Shelters for domestically abused women need to be female only.
this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2026
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Please explain why. Do you believe that all males are domestic abusers and that no women in same-sex relationships have ever been abused?
I volunteered at a shelter with my mother as a younger teen. Then overnight I went from someone who could reliably count cans of Habitant soup and diapers to someone who could not be trusted to know the address. My best friend at the time and his mother were victims of domestic violence. The inference hurt and still does 30 years later. So I would like to understand your position.
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identification
Gender doesn't help here. Or there would be no confusion over it in place of an image. The image provides more information and the gender marker is unreliable as an identifier even for cis people.
Ok. I get the sex differentiation when needing medical care. What I don't get is why we have to tell everyone else what gender we are. If you can do the job, what does it matter? If you are driving, what does it matter? You can change your appearance at any time. Now, I know that injuries can happen anywhere, but there are so many variables in appearance and dress that it seems pointless. Emergency services don't demand sex identification before treatment. Doctors treat injuries not sex. Yes, there can be treatments that need this information, doctors do ask for a valid reason. I know I'm neurodivergent. I just feel like it's not really my business whatcha got going on below the "packaging" in a non-having sexual relations soon kinda way. If I would like to have sex with you, I would then start with what I've got going on, then ask if you're ok with that. I've always assumed the people I've had sex with were human, haven't gone wrong with that yet. I didn't decide to have sex with someone on what I think is under their clothing. Communication is key folks. I have made assumptions in my life, but a quick, kind correction is not going to ruin my day. Yes, I've made passes to persons who turned me down, who hasn't? Didn't slow me down. I've mostly worked in office situations, but I did have a few years driving tractor-trailers, even there, you really don't know what the "packaging" covers. I think it's just all just busy bodies poking their noses and prejudice into others people's lives. They can just fuck off with that shit. So many want to bring up safety reasons, maybe we should start with stopping non-consent culture and supporting those who have suffered. Today's culture explicitly supports non-consent culture. It's disgusting. Sorry for the wall of text.
Women are excluded from medical studies and even medicines designed for women are trialed on men, anyway, so I would argue it wouldn't make a difference medically, anyway.
I wouldn't, due to biological differences in sex. I mean, not that I wouldn't take drugs designed for women, but if you're hemorrhaging blood or have a problem where certain medicines present contraindications with your biology, you'd want a doctor to know.
Primary care physicians need to know what conditions you might be susceptible to in the future, and some of these conditions are based on your sex.
I agree ... ish
I think sex identification is useful for medical stuff, until it isn't. If I was born with testicles, and I have a motorcycle accident that removes them. I don't have testicular cancer. The bit here isn't that I am "male" so I might have testicular cancer, the importance is "do I have testicles".
Sex is an overall term that may align with certain likelyhoods, chances or diagnosis. But even then, it's not a guarantee.
Anemia is the first thing on my mind, but I don't have girl parts and fail to grasp the significance of that other than people telling me that it's bad.
My first statement is about medical personnel asking valid questions about physical sex. Considering there are quite a variety of answers to this question, it's most likely needed in your example. If you have had testicular cancer, it could have metastatic implications without actually having testicles at that time. I would hope that it would be caught before then, but I take your example to mean your testicles were removed in the motorcycle accident (I assume they are gone?) so you assume that you didn't have, at the time of the accident, testicular cancer? Idk, seems to support my points. No ish involved.
We have laws making it illegal to discriminate according to gender. If there are zero legal gender categories, there is no legal basis by which one can say discrimination has occured, so nobody can technically commit such a crime.
Different laws apply to different genders
(from our thread in Actual Discussion) It exists as you see it in this weird middle state now because gender used to be completely synonymous with sex.
I first became familiar with the idea of gender in High School in the 90's. Unlike most, I have forestry credits as I was in boarding school and had some very... odd classes. We ran an apiary and made our own honey, kept and raced sled dogs, worked a restaurant we ran, ran a library, etc.
We were tasked with taking care of a square kilometre of forest up in Northern Canada and, as such, had to learn about plant species native to the region. We learned about plant gender.
Plants have a gender because they lack a biological sex; it is a different classification system. In regards to humans, however, the dictionaries (and people using the term) at the time used it interchangeably with the term sex. The only differentiation that I ever saw between the two was in dealing with plants or heavily academic papers.
Intersex humans were, at least taxonomically, an aberration and not a classification. Early on they presented and operated as whatever their dominant sexual traits would indicate and frequently did not deviate and there was little issue with this.
But... even since the early 80's when I was born, there was a wide berth in what it could mean to be a man or woman. When people were talking about stereotypes, they seemed to be speaking about things that I'd seen in old TV shows from the 50's and 60's, not things I was familiar with in real life. That "housewife and single breadwinner husband" home shit was long past and seemed antiquated even then. It wasn't BAD to be stereotypical or not, mind you, but other than a few farming households I knew, I never saw the "stay-at-home-Mom" dynamic. Every family had a different dynamic and people fit where they built themselves space to do so. I knew very few "stereotypical male" Dads or "stereotypical female" Moms other than on TV, and we all knew damn well that TV wasn't true to life.
When I witnessed third-wave feminist messaging start to get big in the 2010s speaking about this stuff like it was common, expected, and had to be destroyed, it was odd to me. It was like they were fighting with ghosts from days long past.
I recognize that my personal experiences don't match everyone, but I lived in Cincinnati, Edmonton, Calgary, Saudi Arabia, Kingston, Amsterdam, Thailand, Kentucky, and many more. The only place I witnessed what could be described as "traditional roles" was in Saudi, and even then it was only defined by a few laws, not the way people actually acted. I knew many friends that had their father completely cowed by their mother even in that insane theocracy.
All that to say that gender in humans... doesn't seem to have a purpose to me. Since gender can be fluid in humans, it is not at all worth categorizing in humans. It means, effectively, nothing. It's like trying to categorize hair colour down to the hex code; it accomplishes nothing whatsoever.
Sex is a medically distinguishing characteristic. I get why it needs to exist. Gender? I don't understand why it came to be used for anything as it hasn't done anything other than stir basic culture war garbage.
This matches closely with my own experience.
Not necessarily legal but tracking genders is extremely important for data analytics in almost every field. For example knowing certain diseases affects genders differently allows scientists to create better medicines or medicines that target different things. Like medicines that are specifically designed to be safe for pregnancy.
That would be tracking sex, not gender. Gender has no bearing on medical issues as it’s a social construct.
While true, thos doesn't mean the state has to track the gender. It can be part of medical files. The state also doesn't care about my blood type, which is also super important in some medical situations.
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The important thing is not the legal genders, but that we can hate somebody we don't know for something they haven't done.
Many users have mentioned medical reasons, but there are also a bunch of legal privileges that only one gender has. In my country,
- Some number of jobs (usually 33%) are reserved for women. Some states reserve a small number of jobs for transpeople / intersex / third gender people.
- Maternity leave > paternity leave
- Many government schemes are only for women.
- In a divorce, if the children do not have strong preferences for either parent, they are sent with the mother.
- At night, women cannot be kicked out of trains for travelling without tickets.
- Women can only be searched / arrested by policewomen.
- Religious accomodations, like Sikh men but not women having a right to carry knives in high-security areas.
- In Delhi and nearby areas, men are less likely to get sexually assualted.
Sounds like the problem is a lack of gender equality, which I suppose would in fact need to be fixed first.
We don't.
Medical issues.
Men and women have different anatomy and needs. Knowing your biological sex for medical reasons is kinda important.
Everywhere else, it's a social construct and does not matter in the slightest.
Weird as fuck how heavily this gets downvoted.
Yes, it does matter in a medical context. Anyone who thinks otherwise is fucking ridiculous and not understanding the nature of reality.
I agree that it doesn't matter in too many other places. But pretending it doesn't matter in a medical context is quite frankly ridiculous.
It's important for people with breast tissue to get screened for breast cancer.
It's important for people with prostates to get screened for prostate cancer.
People who bleed each month often have lower hemoglobin levels that are not as immediately alarming as in people who don't bleed every month.
It's not rocket science. Enjoy not being treated for potentially deadly issues because you think biological sex is irrelevant to medical issues.
Look...express yourself however best suits you. I absolutely advocate people expressing themselves in whatever manner of gender that is truly them. But biology is incredibly important in a medical context.
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