In the first chapter of the 1983 film The Meaning of Life by English comedy troupe Monty Python, an administrator from the National Health Service pays a visit to a hospital.
He is shown the maternity ward and politely asks: "What are we actually doing here?" The answer "Babies!" amazes and elated him: "What we can do!" , if you take an article that The New York Times published a year ago under the headline "What are puberty blockers?".
Patrick Bahners
Feuilleton correspondent in Cologne and responsible for "Humanities".
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The reason was a law in the state of Arkansas that prohibits the administration of these drugs to young people who express a desire to change their sex.
As the name suggests, puberty blockers halt the physical changes that determine the pubertal stage of development.
They were developed to treat children who start puberty too early.
To explain how the drugs work, the article explains what the effects of the two hormones are, the production of which is blocked in the body by the injections or implants.
“In people who are assigned females at birth, these hormones trigger the ovaries to make estrogen, which stimulates processes such as breast growth and menstruation.
In people who are assigned the male gender at birth,
If one takes these two sentences literally, then they ascribe miraculous effects to a bureaucratic procedure in the maternity wards.
The gender entry would be responsible for half of the people growing breasts and half growing beards.
The sentences are not correct as they stand.
It can happen that the doctor makes a mistake and enters the wrong sex in the file.
Then the hormones do not work as described.
Of course not – one would like to say.
But perhaps you shouldn't say that if you follow the rules that the New York Times colleague observed when choosing words.
Now, as an informative explanatory piece, your article is quite harmless in the best sense of the ideal of neutrality in American press ethics and actually not misleading.
It's just become common
For the British philosopher Kathleen Stock, the conventional nature of this expulsion of the natural from language shows the explosiveness of the problem that she wants to draw attention to with her book "Material Girls".
She thinks the terms are factually incorrect.
"In the vast majority of cases, the gender is not 'assigned at birth', but determined - mostly by observation at birth, in rare cases only later." Wrong terms convey wrong ideas.
Humans are not born male or female, but are assigned a sex, or are assigned one of the two sexes: we have become accustomed to this manner of speaking, at least in official and academic texts, and it is Stock's well-founded fear that with it accompanied by a change in the way of thinking.