Technicals  🧾 📉

I thought sex and gender were different? If sex is biological then requiring genetics tests makes sense right?https://twitter.com/FuggerNugger/status/1158542838189187073 …

It's more nuanced than that, but the specific reason this is a cited instanced of trans erasure is that while medically sex and gender are defined as different things, we still use them interchangeably in social contexts and hence many trans people label their sex accordingly.

In legal contexts, there is no reason to identify based on sex in the first place. Sometimes people do not function as the gender corrosponsing to their sex and hence "gender" would make more sense as a legal identifier.

The fact the definition is being updated to the medical definition, rather than updating the term to the one we use now to refer to social contexts is a deliberate act on the part of the current administration to inscribe biological determinism into law hence why it's transphobic

Why would we use words referring to social context for medical documents?

We wouldn't, but government papers aren't medical documents. We're talking about driver's licenses, armed service enlistments, student loan applications yada yada.