Thread by @JLCederblom

@FlohrFritz @ortrudethevegan I'm sick of the term "gender" in general. I'm tired of having to work out which distinct school of thought and/or sect the person using it subscribes to before I can even extract any meaning from what they've written.

@FlohrFritz @ortrudethevegan An apparent rite of passage in writing trans-related papers is to include some rough definition of what trans is in the introduction (example in image). I compiled a number of these, all on a single trans-related surgery, and it's a mess to read.

@FlohrFritz @ortrudethevegan If you simply glance over the various phrasings in the papers, you won't notice a problem. But if you actually look at what they say, they don't agree at all.

@FlohrFritz @ortrudethevegan The first question I considered was "does gender have anatomy or sex characteristics?". They all roughly agreed, although four of the fourteen had definitions that did not indicate either way.

@FlohrFritz @ortrudethevegan I then looked at whether the registration of a childs sex at birth was "assigning a gender", meaning "sex" and "gender" would be the same. Six papers said yes, one said no, and seven did not comment.

@FlohrFritz @ortrudethevegan I then looked at the question "is gender binary?". Nine papers were quite vague about this, three papers said yes and two papers said no.

@FlohrFritz @ortrudethevegan Out of interest, I wondered how many of these papers simply treated gender and sex as interchangable terms, for example by saying "gender dysphoria is discomfort with anatomic sex". That number was four of fourteen.

@FlohrFritz @ortrudethevegan Exactly why these 14 papers on technical surgical procedures (the kind of paper with gory pictures in it) felt a need to include a vague and useless definition of trans is unclear to me.

@FlohrFritz @ortrudethevegan That no one seems to care that they all disagree about what "gender" is also worries me. Even two papers that both cited the DSM-5 definition (which itself is broken) disagreed on the questions I looked at.

@FlohrFritz @ortrudethevegan