Today the NY Times published an opinion piece co-authored by Alex Byrne and Carole K. Hooven. Byrne is a philosopher and Hooven is an evolutionary biologist. The piece looks at the recent surge in popularity of the phrase “sex assigned at birth.”
As you may have noticed, “sex” is out, and “sex assigned at birth” is in. Instead of asking for a person’s sex, some medical and camp forms these days ask for “sex assigned at birth” or “assigned sex” (often in addition to gender identity). The American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association endorse this terminology; its use has also exploded in academic articles. The Cleveland Clinic’s online glossary of diseases and conditions tells us that the “inability to achieve or maintain an erection” is a symptom of sexual dysfunction, not in “males,” but in “people assigned male at…
