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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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I just came across a word that I feel could be very useful in the trans debate: signalment. Specifically, I'm inspired by the way the term is used in verterinary medicine.

Signalment is a complete description of the patient including species, breed, age and date of birth, sex and reproductive status, whether the animal is neutered or intact.

I feel like this term captures an important point I've seen brought up in a few contexts - that a person's status as transgender might matter to their doctor, and their sexual partners, but it doesn't matter much to their social interactions in ~90% of cases. "Signalment" seems to capture the idea of "medically necessary information needed by a physician to narrow down their search space and provide quality care." Just as it might be important to know that dalmations are more prone to bladder stones than other breeds, it might be important to know that a patient is "Female, with a hysterectomy, and on testosterone for the last 3 years" because that might provide unique medical information that could be useful to the proper treatment of a patient.

I think it also bypasses some of the issues people take with terms like "biological sex" or "gametic sex."

Instead of saying, "Your biological sex is still male though", to a transwoman, you could instead say, "Your sex signalment is 'male, orchiectomy, testosterone blockers and estrogen for 5 years.'"

Then we could have the following distinction:

  • Signalment: All the medically relevant information about a patient.

  • Courtesy title (honorific), personal pronouns and gender identity: All of the social information that will make interacting with the patient easier.

So a patient might be Miss Tiffany Lewis [she/her, woman], with a sex signalment of "male, orchiectomy, testosterone blockers and estrogen for 5 years."

As others said, this misses the overall debate and more importantly also function of language. Overall you have two types of language: you have colloquial, normal language that tends to be broad enough so that it is simple to learn and capable of communicating vast majority of day-to-day concepts between people with different backgrounds. It tends to break on the edge cases. Then you have scientific language (that rationalists prefer), which requires a lot more effort to learn, it is mostly meant for smaller communities of let's say academics but which has advantage of being able to deal with edge cases that these communities find interesting.

A simple example of a word: chair. Go and google image the word chair, you will find all types of those: office chairs, lounge chairs, plastic chairs, wooden chairs, chairs with armrests and those without them, chairs with multiple legs but also chairs with square or circular base. Now there may be some edge cases, where we may have confusion if something is a chair, or a table and many other edge cases. But people generally know a difference between table and chair. The solution should not be to force people to say: "Please, sit on that plastic object over there, that weighs 4.85 pounds and that has four cylindric legs touching the ground."

In a sense I think that your proposition is just another attack on normal language and parlance and common sense. It is exactly in line with the original attempt that similarly confuses words such as sex and gender and personality and interests and so on, which just reinforces the idea that everything is just socially constructed and everybody is entitled to their own version of social reality, and that there is no common ground for communication - of course except of social power relations in this never-ending cultural war of what group can force their version of social reality upon the rest of us. The only criterion for preferring certain language has to be moral/ethical/ideological one, there is no such thing as usefulness of language, or its history - it is only about power and if it leads to "good" or "bad" moral outcomes. I refuse the whole thing as a premise.