TheMuffinMan

He is being childish, but if I am completely honest, it sounds like you are a little too. Not in how bothered you are by the situation (understandable), but more how you perceive it.

I totally understand wanting to just do the work and cut the meaningless chatter, but the reality is a job usually has more abstract requirements outside of specific job tasks. One of these is getting your manager to like you. Social cohesion is one of the things workplaces tend to look for.

Not every manager cares about small talk perhaps as much as yours does, but that’s the situation you are in.

My advice would be to decide on one of the following 1) work elsewhere where you can thrive without this obstacle, 2) develop the skill of faking being interested, or 3) do nothing but get frustrated and possibly miss out on promotions or similar.

Wishing you the best, from a socially inept person with autism who relates to that dread, haha.

“centred around” is a subjective projection rather than statement of a fact in cases where gamete production genuinely does not occur. For this person, her gonads never developed into either testes or ovaries, so by this definition she would be of neither sex. I’m OK with that, but it does undermine your point about the strict binary.

My question to you is why does this matter, in the context of accessing bathrooms and changing rooms? Do you think inspecting reproductive anatomy is a proportionate measure?

More broadly speaking, what is the point of recording the ‘biological sex’ of a person who, through transition, has changed their physiology and endocrine profile to that associated with the opposite, and no longer has their natal reproductive anatomy? Who would this benefit?

…nope. Her body can’t produce either. And she has a uterus and fallopian tubes.

Gotcha. Their point is kind of right though; sex is less of a strict binary category and more 2 clusters we (people) created that allow us to more easily classify specimens based on strongly correlated traits. Both clusters have some overlap, and no trait on its own completely determines the cluster.

E.g. I knew a case of this woman who grew up her whole life never knowing she has XY chromosomes, because she had seemingly typical female sex characteristics. It was only when she and her husband where struggling to conceive and they went to a fertility clinic, that that fact came to light. “Biological male” might be the cluster you’d want to put her under, but she lacks many of the features of that cluster, so in that case the binary classification is a little weak.

Of course most people/animals are not intersex (or transitioned), but the point is that the biological sex binary is kind of a shorthand / way of making life easier to classify most of the population, but it’s not perfect or tidy.

The easiest way to stay accurate is to just narrow down to the specific relevant trait (“person with facial hair”, “person with androgenetic alopecia”, etc.) depending on what specifically is measured/being talked about. But being that precise can come at the expense of being less clear/accessible to the layman, which is why we use biological sex as a concept.

I’m not the person you asked, but ‘assigned sex’ is fine. The common one is ‘assigned gender at birth’.

I’m not entirely sure what point you’re making, when sex reassignment surgery exists.

Not all trans people get it, sure, but many trans men have dicks and many trans women have vaginas. These usually align cosmetically but will have functional differences to their cis counterparts. Where would you crudely sort such people?

There’s also genital nullification surgery (think Barbie doll - nothing at all).

I’m done living in this shithole.

Not that I ever would, but if I went into the women’s they’d (rightly) tell me to fuck off or report me to staff.