‘Assigned at Birth’

Author’s note: Due to the nature of the topic, there is much blasé (though not graphic) discussion of genitalia in this particular blog post. If this sort of talk offends you or makes you uncomfortable, I suggest you stop reading this particular post as soon as possible. Otherwise, have fun. And don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I’ve been able to occasionally stop by the weekly meetings held by Oberlin’s Lambda group, which is nearly a miracle considering my schedule is pretty unforgiving. It’s been quite nice to have an excuse to chat with some of my friends who I don’t often see otherwise. Plus, we always have interesting discussions, from how to make safe spaces for queer high schoolers to raising queer-conscious kids.

A couple of weeks ago, we had a discussion that is particularly dear to my heart as a trans man: words and phrases used to describe queer folks. A large part of the conversation was taken up with discussion of the phrase “(fe)male assigned at birth,”* a phrase often used to describe somebody who doesn’t necessarily identify with the body they were born in. Funnily enough, the two gender queer/non-conforming people in the room were the two people who absolutely hated the phrase, while most others defended it. As it turns out, one of my good friends (who I’ll call Pat) and I both squirm at the phrase, though for different reasons.

For Pat, the phrase elicits an emotional reaction, making them think of a doctor peering at their genitals when they were a baby. So for them, if another person calls themselves “(fe)male assigned at birth,” that’s perfectly fine, but when somebody uses the phrase to refer to Pat, it feels a little creepy and gross.

Like Pat, I think that a person should be able to choose how they want to describe themselves. And again like Pat, I’m still kinda skeptical of the “assigned at birth” phrase. At least, I don’t want people using it to describe me. Personally, while I can understand some people’s squeamishness, it’s not the idea of a doctor having to look at a baby’s junk that bothers me. That seems perfectly natural – the person’s a doctor, and as such, she is doing her job of making sure that the kid is healthy, well documented, and heading back home with the right parent. But the fact that the doctor is “doing her job” is a large part of the reason that I have an issue with saying somebody is “(fe)male assigned at birth.” The phrase is often used almost maliciously, as if the doctor had a say in what genitals or organs the baby came out of the womb with; or, alternatively, as if – as an acquaintance once explained to me (in so many words) – God is sitting upstairs saying, “Hmm, I feel like this one should have a dick, that one should have a vagina, and this other one should have ‘nads and a uterus.” The problem with the latter explanation should be self-explanatory: if you use that explanation of the phrase, it creates an assumption that the person being described as “(fe)male assigned at birth” believes in God – and, more specifically, a God who purposefully assigns babies’ physical sexes. So if you’re describing yourself or somebody who you know shares your beliefs, fine. But it then gets uncomfortable when you’re describing somebody who may not share the same beliefs.

Unfortunately, trans babies, like most babies, don’t actually come packaged with identification labels. Usually.

The first explanation, on the other hand, gets more complicated. It suggests that the doctor is passing judgements when (s)he’s really only recording what kind of body popped out of the woman who (s)he was taking care of. So, saying that somebody is “female assigned at birth” technically only means that the doctor saw a vagina on the kid, and therefore wrote down “female.” At the same time, the phrase suggests that this little mark of “female” on a sheet of paper purposefully dooms this kid to a life of poofy dresses, pink tutus, and American Girl dolls. It doesn’t help that the word “assign” implies that there is more than one sensical option to choose from and that the assigner had a high level of agency in making that choice. Because, you know, it wouldn’t be weird or confusing at all if the doctor – who only has the kid’s genitals and organs to go by – writes down “male” for a kid with a vagina and ovaries. Let’s be honest here: especially in the years before a kid has the ability to express themselves in words, “male” and “female” are pretty much used to describe what body parts the kid has. Those words really only come to carry the weight of gender and identity for the kid later in life, once they start to understand the complexities of gender differences, self expression, etc. (These discoveries can begin at least as early as five years old, but they certainly aren’t happening for a newborn.) During the conversation I had with my friends at Lambda, one person – let’s call him Jonah – compared the process of “assigning gender” to sorting different colored balls. He asked us to imagine that we had two boxes and a bunch of red and blue toy balls. Then, imagine that we had to sort the balls into the two boxes. Would we just do it randomly, tossing each ball into whichever box we felt like, regardless of color? Or would we put the reds in one box and the blues in another? A choice is made there, Jonah argued, just as a doctor has a choice to label a baby as “male” or “female.” Thing is, whether we’re “sorting” the balls randomly or by color, we’re still calling the red ones “red” and the blue ones “blue,” just like it makes more sense to call a newborn with a penis “male” and a newborn with a vagina “female.” Since the balls aren’t going to pipe up and tell us, “Actually, I feel more purple today, so could you paint me purple?” it would get confusing to call them something other than the color (or sex) that they appear. Besides, I sure hope a newborn isn’t going to pipe up and tell me, “Hi, I identify as female despite being the not-so-proud owner of a penis.” News flash: newborns can’t talk well enough to tell us their gender identity.** Newborns who could do that would be creepy.

Still, Jonah hit on something important. Much of the insistence on using “assigned at birth” to describe a person seems to stem from the frequent forcing of gender stereotypes on kids from a very young age, going so far as to color-code baby clothes, blankets, and toys based on the kid’s genitals. But the kid is assigned the stereotype, not the body that may or may not have elicited that stereotypical treatment. And in buying so much into this frustration with gender “assignment” through societal norms, we almost start thinking like the ignorant people who act as if a “boy” in a dress will somehow grow a vagina, or a “girl” playing with a truck will magically sprout a penis. We forget that being trans or gender queer is largely about how your gender identity interacts, so to speak, with your physical sex – not about what gender norms you were or were not raised with. (How you were raised can play a role in it, but that’s not necessarily what gender queerness is about.) There are people who were (and are) raised playing with dolls even though they have (or had) masculine bodies, and people raised playing with trucks despite physical femininity. There are people who very much identify as male, but who love wearing dresses and heels; and there are people who very much identify as female, but who love digging in the dirt or working with hammers and nails. It’s not about the environment a person is raised in, or how they present themselves – and it’s definitely not the result of a doctor seeing that the person had a penis when they were born and naturally putting their sex down as “male.” It’s about how they identify.

So it makes me more comfortable to describe a trans or gender queer person as “(fe)male bodied” (or “intersex” where appropriate). Or, if they feel at home in their body – whether because of hormones, surgery, or a non-binary gender identity – “born (fe)male bodied” or “born intersex” is quite unoffensive, in my book. Because, let’s face it, when we use these kinds of terms, we’re not not talking about whether a person wears dresses or slacks. We’re talking about the junk they are (or were) carrying underneath those dresses and slacks – the stuff that nobody “assigned.”

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*For the sake of simplicity, I am at least temporarily not going into detail about intersex babies. Plus, I’m not well-informed enough about intersex people to say anything other than that some kids are born intersex, and that issues of an intersex kid being actually and literally assigned a gender at birth brings up issues that I don’t have the authority to wade through. Suffice to say that said literal assignment does unfortunately happen in many cases, but in this particular blog, we are discussing trans folks who were not born intersex, and who therefore did not experience that literal, physical assignment of sex.

**Assuming they’re even cognizant of it at that point.