so with that in mind: assigning people as male or female is absolutely a social construct, in my opinion, if only because "male" and "female" are blunt instruments for describing what's actually a really wide variety of what's going on when we're talking about "biological sex" and there are plenty of people at the margins (intersex people in one way or another account for roughly 1% of live births) where the only thing separating them from being declared "male" or "female" is a doctor's say-so when they're born (people born with ambiguous genitalia, people with XY chromosomes but "female" genitalia, etc.) also a lot of how we specifically conceive of whether is someone as male or female in western societies is really not much older than the 19th century. and then there's the entire issue of people growing up and saying "hey, i really don't identify with this sex i was assigned at birth." so if we're going to say "assigning people a biological sex at birth is a bad idea" just based on that, like, true? BUT it's not necessarily bad just because it's a social construct, it's potentially bad because we live in societies where those aren't just kind of things that are left on their own and don't impact people's lives, they're things that have traits and roles and value judgments attached, even if you're someone who fits exactly into the current medical models of "male' or "female". those are categories with implied power relations (of course mediated by 2093523532 other potential factors, but.) SO coming back to "is it bad" like... .in my opinion yes but I also genuinely don't believe it's possible to even envision a society in which "it's a boy" or "it's a girl" isn't one of the first things said about an infant without capitalism being out of the picture. patriarchy doesn't need capitalism, necessarily, but i do think capitalism needs patriarchy, and being able to point to someone as early as birth and say "this is how you should fit into that structure" is essential to capitalism in some way. also, implied in "assigning biological sex is hurtful" is that there is a better way to do things, but it seems like everyone has a different version of what that better way to do things would be. like i hear everything from "abolish gender" (which is usually just a convoluted code for "trans women make me uncomfortable and i don't want to have to acknowledge that they're women too," which, don't get me started omg) to "at birth all babies should just not be assigned anything and decide what's up as they get older" (which, okay, i guess?) but i'd like to imagine it'd be something where "male" or "female" or "other" are about as significant or insignificant as like, hair color or some other similar thing? but again i think that pretending that any of that is remotely possible under capitalism is kind of bananas, not that it's not possible to work toward erasing stereotypes or questioning those categories as empirical and immutable and unquestionable but that in order for anything to really, really change in that department it'll have to change in conjunction with a move away from capitalism