Marie Caradonna

Ashland

Alan Sokal and Richard Dawkins are creating their own anxiety over dogma. We have sat through countless medical meetings and trainings of health care professionals, and everyone wants to deepen our understanding of how sex and gender affect people every day. Failing to do so means that doctors make medical mistakes and public health professionals overlook health disparities. Medicine and public health cannot rely on just asking sex or just asking gender.

Patients like us, our friends, and our families in the LGBTQ community have a lifetime of mistrust and fear built up around the health care system. Much of this mistrust stems from a denial that sex and gender are different for some people.

We are professionals who can handle the nuance of real peoples lives. No one denies the role of biology or the role of anatomy or the existence of categories of sex and gender. We just know that simple categories arent accurate, and we aim for accuracy. Anyone who does not want to ask someone about their sex assigned at birth or their current gender identity should not go into the helping professions. Over here we care about real people.

Jessica Halem

Senior director

The Eidos LGBTQ+ Health Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania

Philadelphia

Dr. Carl G. Streed Jr.

Associate professor of medicine

Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine

Boston

If the current leadership of organizations and agencies such as the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention want to provide the best medicine and future for Americans, they should heed the warning and follow the guidance of Alan Sokal and Richard Dawkins in their op-ed, Sex and gender: The medical establishments reluctance to speak honestly about biological reality.

Sokal and Dawkins are spot-on with their caution of the harm that would be done if public health and health care leaders continue to adopt and promote phrasings such as sex assigned at birth. Though perhaps politically well-intended toward promoting greater social justice, this language misleads people into thinking that a persons biological sex is arbitrary, when it never is. As the authors warn, obscuring biological facts has real medical import and can misinform people in ways that validate ignorance, which itself only enables social injustice.

I am the proud parent of two self-described queer children, one a gender nonconforming woman and one transgender nonbinary. However, their biologically determined sex is female, and that determination matters for their health and medical care no matter how they experience and live their lives socially.

Though some may disagree, our world improves as we better understand and embrace male boys, male men, male girls, male women, male nonbinary people, female boys, female men, female girls, female women, and female nonbinary people. We can do this without falsifying or muddying long-established scientific knowledge about the determination of the sex of human beings.

Dr. James L. Sherley

Boston

The writer is a physician scientist.

At 13 years old, my gynecologist dismissed my severe pain. At 18, my insurance denied coverage for stage 3 endometriosis treatment. At 22, I find myself frustrated by debates over inclusive language in medicine.

Regarding the concerns raised by Alan Sokal and Richard Dawkins, the training of future doctors is indeed at risk. However, its not the denial of biological sex that jeopardizes this training. Rather, its the systemic disregard for the needs of individuals with vaginas within our health care system.

I applaud the decision by the American Medical Association and other groups to prioritize human rights. I am more than willing to recognize a lexical revision in the hope of fostering a more inclusive environment. Please, we need to spend less time scrutinizing progress and more time identifying areas where progress is desperately needed.

Sofia Long

Boston

I am very concerned about a society that encourages diversity in every life form but our own. Human nature is more expansive than the binary categories we are limited to. In reality, there are more physiological patterns that disprove binary sex and gender than support it. Approximately 1 out of 2,000 children are born with sex or reproductive anatomy considered atypical, and 1 out of 1,666 people have nonbinary chromosomes (XXY, XO, XYY, XXYY, or mosaic).

The damage such limited thinking does has rallied millions of intersex survivors to speak out about nonconsensual, nonemergent genital surgeries we were subjected to as children to reinforce this binary myth. The United Nations has even linked those medical protocols to forms of torture, and Human Rights Watch has raised concern. As a survivor of such protocols, I wholeheartedly agree.

Esther Leidolf

Jamaica Plain

The writer is president of the MRKH Organization, a patient-run network for women with Mayer-von-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hasers Syndrome.

Despite Alan Sokal and Richard Dawkinss authoritative tone in making pronouncements about sex and gender and their concern over the growing use of the phrase sex assigned at birth, they apparently know little about people born with various intersex syndromes. Sadly, many physicians also know little about this reality and perform medically unnecessary operations on newborns to make their anatomy conform to existing norms. The surgeries performed on intersex newborns inflict lives of pain, repeated surgeries, anguish, and, often, sexual dysfunction.

Susan Jacoby

Jamaica Plain

See the article here:

Debating sex and gender: Whose 'biological reality' is it anyway? - The Boston Globe