The American Medical Association is not some sort of pound-shop outfit. If you have never heard of it, then know this: It is the largest association of doctors and medical practitioners in the United States. It has almost a quarter of a million members, and annual revenue of about $350million. For decades, it has been the undisputed voice of American Medicine. Which makes this pronouncement, in its most recent report, very notable. The incorrect, American, spellings here are theirs, not mine, by the way:
It is the recommendation of the AMA’s LGBTQ Advisory Committee that our AMA should advocate for removal of sex as a legal designation on the public portion of birth certificates. Assigning sex using a binary variable and placing it on the public portion of the birth certificate perpetuates a view that it is immutable and fails to recognize the medical spectrum of gender identity. Participation by the medical profession and the government in assigning sex is often used as evidence supporting this binary view. Imposing such a categorization system risks stifling self expression and self-identification and contributes to marginalization and minoritization.
In plain English, what they are saying is that birth certificates should simply record a child’s name, the date that they were born, and the relevant information about the child’s parents, and that the biological sex of the child should not be stated on the birth cert. The reason that they wish to do this, they say, is that having every child’s biological sex recorded as “male” or “female” effectively amounts to the Government endorsing the idea that every child is male, or female, which they dispute.
Further, they are concerned that having one’s sex recorded as male or female might “stigmatise” people who, in later life, decide that they are in fact of the opposite gender, and pursue a gender transition.
The significance of this, of course, should not be underestimated. This is not some political lobby group embracing the idea that biological sex does not matter: It is one of the most powerful associations of medics in the world, and one of the most influential. Where the AMA leads, you can expect, in due course, to see its European counterparts follow.
For the past year, or more, we have been told to trust doctors, and science. Yet on this issue, we have doctors overtly abandoning science in favour of ideology. The science on this matter is settled: Mammals – all mammals – are either biologically male, or biologically female. Children can only be created with the involvement of a male, and a female. A person may well feel sincerely that they have been “born in the wrong body”, but they cannot reverse the natural process by which their chromosomes were assigned. They cannot reverse their body’s instinct to produce male or female hormones or develop physically in a male or female way. They may feel that their biological sex is a curse, but they cannot reverse or change it. They can only change how they identify to the rest of us and ask us to go along with it.
Denying any of this helps nobody. If it were possible to wave a wand and change somebody’s biological sex to make them, truly, into the woman or man they wish to be, then all of this would be harmless. The problem is that trans rights activists – including those in medicine – are rushing to convince people that they can do something which is impossible. A man can grow his hair long, change his name, and change his legal gender, for example. He can go further, and take female hormones. He can have his genitalia surgically altered. But he can never truly have a female body. That is determined at conception, long before any of us ever become conscious.
In fact, since biological sex is so final, and so irreversible, it would be madness not to record it at birth. Birth certificates are not only documents affirming somebody’s identity – they are also historical and genealogical records. They are how we trace long lost relatives, or ancestors. They provide vital information about a person not, as the AMA seems to think, for the benefit of the person themselves, but for anybody who might wish to trace that person, or verify their identity. For most of us, a birth certificate is unnecessary, since we know our parents and where we were born. But in those cases when it is vital information – an adopted person tracing their parents, for example – then accuracy is vital. Consider a situation, one hundred years from now, where people are using birth certificates to trace their ancestors. Under this proposal, they would not be able to identify the men from the women. This isn’t medicine – it’s madness.