> but again, why a passport?

Passport isn't only for crossing the border, but to identify for the whole duration of the visit. Travellers don't have national ID documents by definition, and the passport serves this purpose.

E.g. I don't know about your country, but if someone is travelling to my country, he or she is required to keep the passport in the pocket at all times and present to authorities on demand if s/he is stopped on street[1].

So when accessing women-only spaces, like applying for international sports tournaments held in other countries, this will be the document checked.

If you'd like an example involving border crossing, again I don't know much about your country, but if one attempts to cross the border of mine, one of the results might be that you'd be interned in a facility for illegal migrants that for some reason won't be getting political asylum, but can't be deported to the home country either. It would then matter if the person is a man or a woman. Just asking the person is not sufficient, because we can't just allow men to identify themselves into women's wing, as that would violate rights of the women kept there and not free to go elsewhere.

[1] this is contrary to citizens, who aren't generally required to have any ID on oneself, and can just say the name and number if stopped)

If I had to choose to be in a foxhole with a fit 20 year old woman or a flabby 35 year old man, I'm choosing the woman every time. (Even the new, stricter, US military fitness standards are not that hard to meet for either gender)

"... The Humsafar Trust estimates there are between 5 and 6 million hijras in India."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_recognition_of_non-binar...

Ok, we're getting somewhere. Which genes? Specifically.

And does it mean you're proposing genetic testing before putting the sex on a document? What do you do about chimeras carrying different generics in different parts of the body? What about people with organs transplanted from other people? Which part of the body do we check? What does it mean for artificial changes in DNA, like crispr - would that qualify as changing sex? What about just blocking the specific gene expression?

[…]

> Whether a particular flight operator needs to know your sex is another question, and I am not competent enough to know for sure.

Saying "we need this information on documents like this because it's on documents like this is" is (1) circular reasoning, and (2) demonstrably false.

Other jurisdictions besides the USA expressly allow gender to be excluded from this specific document with the identifier "X" meaning "unspecified or other", and yet those legal records are now being rejected by the USA because the USA government doesn't like it.

Heck, the USA itself allowed X on passports until very recently.

It's obviously, provably, demonstrably, unnecessary to demand it be this way on documents for incoming travellers.

If you really, honestly, define gender based on chromosomes, then you must agree that humans have about 15 genders.

If you categorise those 15 documented variations of the X and Y chromosomes into either "male" xor "female" (which is what happens in practice), then you're not defining gender based on chromosomes.

If you define based on physical features, there's overlap, which affects you two ways:

(1) what do you call someone in the middle of a transition from one to the other?

(2) what do you do for people born ambiguous? i.e. your own reaction to being told 200k in the USA are born with ambiguous your reaction is to ask about their chromosomes. Well, why did you reach for that? Clearly the chromosomes weren't all that important if people can't tell by looking.

> These abnormal people deserve their own sports category. They should not be shoehorned into male/female sports. Your point is that they are different from normal right? So act like it.

I've made this point myself back when people first started to realise this.

Issues:

1) the main difference for sports is testosterone, so there's multiple ways to resolve this, e.g. one entirely legit thing we can do is just let people take testosterone for sports, while another is to just categorise people by testosterone counts (the same way for wrestling we already do for body mass).

2) the only externally visible presentation is that you're better at sports and infertile, you actually have to do a genetic test to spot it, so you have to test everyone because the people themselves won't even known unless you do. As nobody does such a test for birth certificates and passports, there's no point putting this information on a passport for the sake of women's sports.

> I told you already. There has been an extreme propaganda campaign to tell people that there is such an abundance of abnormal cases that we need to entertain any mentally ill person claiming any designation for themselves. I am not swayed by this.

No, you.

You have listened to propaganda telling you that the exceptions are "mentally ill" and refused to listen to the evidence to the contrary.

The professionals working with these people do not regard being trans itself as being mental illness.

The medical community examines people for mental illness before allowing surgical transitions, because once you get to surgical interventions downstairs, functional reversal stops being possible.

> Different people have different hormone levels but that does not change their primary biological function.

"Primary" is putting the cart before the horse.

We have many biological functions.

Some of those functions are what worked in the ancestral environment (a community: humans barely function in isolation), where sex differentiation giving males big strong muscles and tough bones was actually important. For that, all that matters is the effect of the sex hormones. That environment barely exists any more, at least in the industrialised nations: sports and some parts of the military are most of the places where this extra strength matters, but again, what matters for that strength is exactly what you're ignoring: the hormones. And we have a lot more control over those hormones now than nature ever intended.

Others of those functions include reproduction. For reproduction, note that gay and ace people exist. Do they have no biological function, or are they a third (/fourth for ace) gender? If you look at historical discussions, there were absolutely people who classed being gay as being a kind of transgender.

> If you asked, "what is a human?" Nobody is confused by that, despite the myriad genetic and physical aberrant phenotypes and syndromes in the world.

Tell that to every genocide ever.

Going back in time, were neanderthals human? We got a lot of their DNA.

Categories like "gender" and "species" were made by us, for our convenience. They're the map, not the territory. The approximation that works until it doesn't.

Denouncing anyone who doesn't fit the categories you've constructed for them as "mentally ill" is a common human failing, but it is a failing. Happens a lot, in many categories, not just those under discussion in this thread.

> In the intersex case I don't really care what kind of mutant they are, it just needs to be recorded that they aren't typical.

Why does it need to be recorded?

Who needs to care?

To repeat: for sports, what matters is the hormones, not how you got them.

Are you going to add a third (/fourth) kind of bathroom for them (or force them to use the disabled ones), just so that the existing male and female toilets can't be made safe for everyone?

I mean, hyperandrogenism is definitely a source of ambiguity as it induces somewhat masculine features like facial hair etc., and that affects about 5%(!) of women of reproductive age, and that's ambiguity without being trans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperandrogenism

> The number of trans people who can pass is vanishingly small anyway.

Not from the ones I've met.

From what I've seen while people do the transition, transitioning is like a second puberty: during the period while your body changes in various ways, your voice sounds funny for a bit, it takes a while to develop a good sense of style for your new shape, and if you're turning into a woman rather than a man it takes ages to learn how much make up is the right amount and doesn't make you look like a clown — and transitioning also has those things.

The trans people who are noticed are those who fail to pass. People don't have a magic sense telling you objective truth, and the same lack of magic sense does also mean cis people sometimes don't pass as their own gender. Like the wife of the French president*, though I've also experienced similar with a butch cis former girlfriend. Heck, my pony tail has confused people from behind, and I keep a beard partially because without it I look really girly.

* One of the more harmless conspiracy theories going around at the moment, IMO