There’s also the fact that having the wrong gender marker on your ID is an incredibly huge barrier to accessing medical care, since it vastly increases the chances of experience transphobia at the hands of your caregivers. A lot of trans people will thus avoid the ER because it’s terrifying and incredibly painful, sometimes with disastrous consequences.
How are you going to x-ray a trans person’s womb/not-womb if you can’t even get them past reception?
As for anon, xray techs can just ask everyone if they might be pregnant, problem completely solved… of course that would make transphobic cis people uncomfortable. It’s shocking that instead of just asking a simple question, the thing that somehow seems most reasonable to cis people is forcing trans people to be misgendered on official documents, and thereby forcing us to out ourselves every single time we use our ID and in every system which draws info from our ID.
I’m going to copy paste a previous response that fits this ask, if that’s cool.
Actually, it’s not incredibly useful, particularly if you’re trans and have been medically transitioning. And btw sex is assigned, not biological, just for the record
Sex categories of male and female are general guidelines so medical practitioners can more easily guesstimate what might be best for you if they have no other knowledge of you. However, since most medical issues with symptoms and effects that vary based on ‘sex’ are actually differing due to hormonal influence, a trans man being treated off-hand as female could (and often does) actually cause more harm than good.
Like, sure, there’s the issue of illnesses and diseases exclusive to certain body parts, but that’s simple enough to specify in a person’s medical records, we don’t need to use arbitrary terms that will often prompt medical staff to make lazy and harmful assumptions about us. If a trans man has a uterus, he can specify that he has a uterus without relying on a term that requires assumptions and guesswork and could cause medical mistreatment from that.
Take, for instance, me. I’m a trans woman. All my documentation, including my medical records, list me as female, as it should (as I don’t just ID as female, I AM female). It’s also listed in my records that I have a prostate, and anything else that wouldn’t typically be present in a ‘typical’ female. My records on my hormone levels are also present, my blood type, even my chromosomes. Everything the doctors would need to know about me, is available in my records, as well as on my person in my wallet on a handy little info card. That way, I don’t get treated like a typical male and potentially end up so dysphoric and medically mistreated that I get suicidal or experience medical complications.
Because the thing is, we (society) don’t fully know how trans people, at least those who have been medically transitioning, respond to disease and illness. Doctors and scientists can guess, and share their own personal pools of knowledge, but that’s about it right now (while many like to assume that one’s assigned sex is a great window of knowledge into how we experience disease and illness, it really, really isn’t, and the fact that close to half of trans people need to teach our medical providers how to treat us effectively should be proof enough that a lot of medical staff are ultimately winging this shit). Like, heart attacks? My endo, and my doctors, tell me to be aware of all sets of symptoms, because some trans women exhibit ‘male-typical’ symptoms, and some exhibit ‘female-typical’ symptoms, and some they just straight up didn’t catch until too late, or there weren’t clearly distinctive patterns of symptoms involved (a mixed bag, basically). From what I’ve been told, they’ve seen a pretty even split, leaning ‘female-typical’ for trans women and ‘male-typical’ for trans men (but who knows what impact the specific hormone regimen and unique biology have on that), but they insist that we cover all our bases for good reason. If that isn’t a big, blatant sign that healthcare access and affordability in general should be a major element in the push for trans rights, I don’t know what is.
So…honestly, in a medical sense, no, assigned sex often isn’t helpful or important for trans folks to list in their medical documents. It’s far, far more important to have as much medical information at the ready as possible, so that medical staff can go in with the most information, which will hopefully reduce instances of mistreatment, neglect, abuse, and general transphobia that trans folks often face in healthcare environments.
Best solution for trans people is to accumulate as much medical info on yourself as you can, and carry it on your person at all times, in case of emergency. That can save lives.
Going by assigned sex? I could list off case after case of how that can severely damage or destroy lives. Save some? Sure, yeah, there are cases where it probably has helped. But it is not the solution we need, and certainly isn’t even an effective stopgap at this point, so let’s please just toss it in the trash and move on?
So yeah, basically, we should be able to alter our sex/gender ID markers at will, to whatever best suits us. It’s not helpful medically (doesn’t even list our blood type, allergies, etc.). And undressing people doesn’t provide necessarily accurate info either, so…like, I don’t know why you listed that as a possibility?
Like, I’m all for everyone having really detailed health documents that would help medical professionals treat them better (and which would have a list of all unique traits to keep account of, like if a person has a womb, a prostate, hormone levels, blood type, chromosome markers, allergies, etc.), so maybe universal public healthcare with paid-for routine medicals to keep that info up to date. But we wouldn’t need a sex marker on those…maybe as an optional designation with M, F, X, or whatever other options, but it’s really not needed.
I hope that clarifies things