(August 5) The American Medical Association apparently thinks parents holding “gender reveal” parties are jumping the gun — not by weeks, but by years.

In defiance of biology, the AMA Board of Trustees passed a resolution urging that birth certificates no longer designate the sex of the person (or maybe that should be the “birthed entity”) at issue. While the AMA’s would-be Solomons acknowledge the absolute medical reality that a person’s “sex” is a biological fact, they say “gender is a social construct that describes the way persons self-identify or express themselves. A person’s gender identity may not always be exclusively male or female and may not always correspond with their [sic] sex assigned at birth.”

Note that birth certificates list “sex” and not “gender,” so the AMA is the one essentially conflating the two. Whatever.

Numerous states allow people to legally change the “sex” listing on their birth certificates if they decide to transition to the gender opposite that of their natural physiology, and the AMA already “supports policies” allowing that change “as reported by the individual and without need for verification by a medical professional [emphasis added].” Apparently, that policy of doctors proclaiming their own irrelevance is no longer woke enough because the AMA now wants to save people the trouble of a legal change by eliminating the original sex designation altogether.

(As if, once someone has gone to the trouble to transition to a new “sex,” with all the emotional trauma that entails, the added effort to change the birth certificate is somehow going to ruin their fragile psyches.)

As the AMA board explains, “Imposing such a categorization system risks stifling self-expression and self-identification, and contributes to marginalization and minoritization.”

Sex, decree these non-scientific scientists, is not “simple and binary.” One in 5,000, you see, “have intersex variations,” and of course, others (in similarly low numbers) “identify as transgender” or “gender nonconforming.” This is the AMA’s explanation for why the delay in “self-identification” until years after birth should trump, on birth certificates, the ordinary ways by which ordinary people and obstetricians always identify them.

Some of us prefer the really old-fashioned “gender reveal” — of actually waiting to see the physical characteristics that show up at birth. Yet, at least the early “reveals” made possible by modern medicine’s imaging pay homage to truth in biology and to the humanness of the unborn child. Now, however, the AMA values “social constructs” more than physiology or, apparently, medicine.

Next thing you know, the AMA will advise parents to announce their new bundles of joy with transgender flags, rather than blue or pink balloons, on their mailboxes. We wouldn’t want to marginalize and traumatize the little tykes, would we?

[That’s the whole column, updated. A slightly different, earlier version of this column ran here — although, for once, you aren’t missing anything if you don’t click on the link.]

 

 

 

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