Sex designations on birth certificates offer no clinical utility; they serve only legal — not medical — goals.

Huh? All states in the US require that newborns soon after birth have blood drawn from a prick of the soles of their feet to be tested for a number of genetic diseases (exactly which diseases varies from state to state). Some of these are life-threatening genetic diseases that manifest at or soon after birth - hemophilia, severe combined immunodeficiency disease (aka "bubble boy disease) - and which occur only in the male sex. Doctors have to know the sex of a newborn to tell the labs (run by or working at the behest of the states) what genetic diseases to test for.

Other deadly genetic diseases that manifest early, such as cystic fibrosis, have a very different trajectory, treatment protocol and mortality depending on whether the child is male or female. Knowing the sex of these children is vital to knowing how to care for them, and for being able to predict their life expectancy.

How is not recording sex in government birth and public health registries in the best interest of children with such conditions? How are the goals of understanding, treating and eventually curing sex-linked diseases aided by not recording sex?

We're only just now getting a sense of all the childhood physical and mental illnesses that occur in females that have gone unnoticed and undiagnosed coz males are considered the default humans and the health complaints of girls and women are customarily pooh-poohed. Not recording sex in official documents - and pretending sex doesn't matter in medical matters - will only muddy the waters and compound the injustices done to females in medical care.

Birth certificates are not identity-validation documents meant to serve the narcissistic, self-serving aims of individuals. They are government-issued records that reflect some of the vital information that governments keep to serve the larger interests of society. BCs prove citizenship, and thus eligibility for rights like voting and programs like welfare and Medicare. Birth registries listing sex help governments plan for things like school accommodations, public toilet provisions, health care needs, military conscription in the case of war, and the makeup of specific health programs and nursing care facilities that eventually will be needed when newborns are elderly. Planning ahead to deal with sex-linked conditions like cervical and breast cancer, prostate cancer, and Alzheimers become impossible if the sex of newborns isn't registered.

Also, if governments don't register sex, then there's no way to track practices such as aborting female fetuses for being female - and the large-scale killing of girls under age 5 - that are now common in countries like India and Pakistan, where hundreds of millions of females are now "missing" and the sex ratios are becoming increasingly skewed as a result. As what's happened in China shows, when there is a marked imbalance in the numbers of males and females in a society, a whole lot of problems ensue.

The much higher rates of hospitalization, ICU admissions and deaths of males due to COVID-19 show how important sex is in medical matters. How can these idiots argue otherwise?