Talk:Cisgender

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 1 July 2019 and 23 August 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Jacklyn.Ang, Cpktruong, Emilyplasencia, Maludino (article contribs).

Assignment issue

"sex that they were assigned at birth" - it needs clarification as to who or how it is assigned and why it must be at birth. Missing source.

Required clarification

1. Why it must be at birth when in most cases parents get to know the gender way before birth.
2. How the assignment happens - is it some consensus between a doctor and parents? Or is it just doctor who assigns it?
3. Is it really an assignment as in making a free decision? Or is it rather a finding in which case the word "assignment" should be replaced by determined or better word describing mere declaration of an existing fact that exists independently on investigator's will.

I am not from USA and after reading this I have serious doubt how it works in US. It is really puzzling and does not reflect ways how we determine the gender in our country. Really, really confusing definition. I have an impression that after birth in US there is some guy who flips a coin and assigns the result to the newly born. That should not be the case - wikipedia should be quite unambiguous and clear.

You should rather remove that assignment sentence altogether if you don't make it clear enough. Leaving it there allows completely insane ideas - not all are from US and many don't have an idea how it looks there...

Elixon (talk) 21:38, 25 October 2019 (UTC)

The inability to concisely explain a complex topic is exactly the reason the phrase in question links to the Assigned sex article. "Assigned sex" and "sex assigned at birth" are the phrases used by sources, and so that's what we use. The lead section doesn't need to be sourced, sources are elsewhere in the article. --Equivamp - talk 00:41, 26 October 2019 (UTC)

(edit conflict)Welcome, Elixon, to en-wiki. The term has nothing specifically to do with the United States. It is standard usage in reliable sources in English, but is a fairly technical term, and many native speakers who are not concerned with cis or trans issues are not aware of this term, either, so you are in good company in being confused.

There is already an article called Sex assignment, and it is hyperlinked from the first sentence of this article, precisely from the term you are unfamiliar with. Did you not notice the link in the first sentence? It should be blueish in your browser or mobile view. A definition of this term is given in the first sentence of the Sex assignment article, followed by another 40,000 bytes all about this term in great detail. There is no point trying to define here, what is defined in great detail there.

The term "sex assignment" does not require further clarification in *this* article in my opinion, because you would then risk having competing definitions in two different articles, which might then diverge with future edits. More importantly, it shouldn't be defined here, because Wikipedia is a wiki. Much better to keep the definition of "sex assignment" at the article Sex assignment, and simply hyperlink it from here. This is the whole point of a wiki (and in fact, the whole point of hypertext in general, going back to the creation of hypertext transfer protocol, and of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee).

I hope this helps respond to your concerns. Mathglot (talk) 00:43, 26 October 2019 (UTC)

I see that Equivamp wrote approximately the same thing, in fewer words, while I was typing my response to you. Mathglot (talk) 00:43, 26 October 2019 (UTC)

OK, linked article Sex assignment clears my misunderstanding up as it clearly states that "sex assignment" is "the determination of an infant's sex". I still maintain that - since it is equivalent - the word *assignment* should be replaced by *determined* because it is obviously much clearer to a wider public and technically interchangeable. Elixon (talk) 08:23, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

The ten assignment is deliberate. It promotes the pseudoscientific idea that gender is a spectrum and that all humans are trans.Arglebargle79 (talk) 22:08, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

@Arglebargle79: Unless you have reliable sources, this is not a forum for you to opine on social science and gender studies regarding transgenderness. EvergreenFir (talk) 21:17, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

I see said the blind man. Some people are using the technical term "sex assignment", while others are using the language meaning of the word "assignment".

The way the sentence is written, and by Wikipedia rules, the English language meaning should be read. And that's problematic; problems not present when the technical term is used.

Either the sentence should be re-written "matches their sex assignment at birth" (with the existing link) to make clear a specific technical term is intended, or use wording like OED uses "corresponds with their birth sex."

Antifesto (talk) 23:30, 2 June 2020 (UTC)

"their sex assigned at birth". Biological sex is not assigned! It is the result of a biological process that precedes birth. A person's sex is clearly defined by their X/Y chromosomes and independent of any form arbitrary assignment.

would a Venn Diagram help?

It occurs to me that a Venn Diagram of some of these terms "cisgender," "cissexual," "transgender," "transexual," ... might be useful. I personally find the relationship between these terms a bit hard to keep straight.

--- VanRos Jan 10, 2020 — Preceding unsigned comment added by VanRos (talk • contribs) 23:08, 10 January 2020 (UTC)

@VanRos:, It might, but because terminology in the field is fluid and evolving, and there isn't universal agreement about the definitions, this might be difficult. In any case, any such diagram would have to be found in a reliable source; anything "built here" would likely be considered "original research" and thus prohibited in an article. Conceivably, someone could draw one up and add it to a Talk page just as a way to stimulate discussion about improving the article, but even then you might get pushback about it.

That said, maybe this will help: assuming you already are aware of the differences between sex and gender, and that your confusion is more between cisgender vs. cissexual, and transgender vs. transsexual. If that assumption is correct, then see Transgender#Evolution of transgender terminology, Transgender#Transsexual and its relationship to transgender, Transsexual#Terminology, and Cisgender#Etymology and terminology. Hope this helps, Mathglot (talk) 02:18, 11 May 2020 (UTC)

Bias issue with quoting

In the section including this partial sentence, "... sex model that fails to account for both the existence of natally [sic] congruent gender non-conforming gender identities, and gender-based discrimination against intersex people based on natal sex characteristics rather than on gender identity or expression, such as "normalizing" infant genital surgeries"

In other locations of the article, when the world "normalizing" is used, it is not quoted. However, in this section "normalizing" is quoted, indicating the author's bias against infant genital surgeries. Glewis104 (talk) 09:09, 1 September 2020 (UTC)