The Dumbest Article You Will Ever Read: Christin Scarlett Milloy, "Don't Let The Doctor Do This To Your Newborn"

facepalm
   Right. Well, it doesn't make any sense to argue with thermonuclear asshattery like that.
   But...that's never stopped me before...
   Here's the short version:
   The URL of the piece is somewhat instructive, and constitutes a more accurate title. The relevant bits:
infant_gender_assignment_unnecessary_and_potentially_harmful
   But: there is no such thing at "gender assignment."
   Doctors, at the birth of a baby, do not "assign" things. And they for damn sure don't assign gender. The genders are masculine and feminine (and maybe androgynous). Those are behavioral categories. They are not assigned. They are descriptions of behaviors. And behaviors that babies don't exhibit. Doctors don't "assign" sex, either. They discover/discern and describe the baby's sex. "Gender assignment" is a fictional phenomenon. Like most of the obsessions of the PC left, it's just made up. It doesn't exist.
   Thing is, there's a much less crazy route to a sane position that's been with us for a long time. Your sex is a biological fact about you. Gender tends to match up with sex in the familiar ways: male: masculine; female: feminine. If it doesn't--if you're a feminine boy or man, or a masculine girl or woman, there's nothing wrong with that.
   See how easy that was?
   There's no need for PC fantasies about gender "assignment"...or sex "assignment" either. There's no need for fables about how Caitlyn Jenner is "really" a woman, nor theories of transgenderism, nor any of that stuff. All those things are confused complications of what's actually a fairly simple set of insights about, well, being yourself. It was apparently revolutionary back in the day--the late '60's or early '70's or whenever. I suppose it's revolutionary again, given the wacky instant orthodoxy about transgenderism that's being pushed on us all now. My hypothesis is that this is mostly a result of the fact that many feminist academicians aren't satisfied with the fact that the insights and intellectual task of feminism were/was fairly simple and straightforward. In a nutshell, women and men are moral equals, and people have historically been oppressed on the basis of their being female. This is, perhaps, what feminists have in mind when they insist that feminism is (just) the radical idea that women are people.  Thing is, of course, that's not all feminism is. Feminism has its old-school, simple, undeniable, egalitarian aspect--the one that I just described. Feminism also has it's post-post-modern, expansionist/imperialist, "totalizing," totally crazy aspect. That's the one that's popular in academia and on the web. According to that version of feminism, feminism is first philosophy. It is the root of all thought, and it permeates everything. It is the foundational discipline, and the key to all mythologies. It's that version of feminism that isn't interested in solid, straightforward, clear, liberal insights like your sex need not determine your gender. New feminism has become mixed in with the worst pseudophilosophy and crackpot social science and literary theory of the last fifty years. It's committed to the craziest of all principles, that saying so makes things so. It is perhaps the most intellectually bankrupt force on the contemporary intellectual scene.
   And it's largely responsible for the bullshit in that article linked to above.