Extremely rarely, this is what happens.
Unfortunate individuals are born with conformation and even chromosomes that aren't obviously one sex or the other.
At least until recently, parents and doctors just picked one.
This is, of course, utterly and entirely different from a physically and genetically unambiguous male or female "deciding" he's really the other sex.
These conditions are very rare. I've seen 1:1500 to 1:2000 tossed around. That's a small number to rearrange your entire society around.
We don't even make all that many allowances for lefties, and they're somewhere around 1:10.
Unfortunate individuals are born with conformation and even chromosomes that aren't obviously one sex or the other. . .
These conditions are very rare. I've seen 1:1500 to 1:2000 tossed around. That's a small number to rearrange your entire society around.
There is that what used to be called hermaphroditism and is now termed "intersex," meaning that one's biological sex is not distinctly identifiable as male or female.
But LGBTQWXŸZ advocates like the ones in this article and other social justice warriors talk about being "assigned" a gender at birth, they are drawing a nonsensical distinction between one's objective biological sex, and one's subjective experience of his/her/hir/xir/whatever's own "gender" that they identify themselves as. In our anti-intellectual world, what you actually are is less important than what you believe yourself to be, which is why a man can one day declare, "I'm a woman," and all the socially conscious nimrods will immediately fall over themselves to affirm the new "Chelsea" and call him "her" and "she."
(Just what is it with the trans* crowd and the name "Chelsea," anyway? If I ever get set up on a blind date with a woman named Chelsea, I'm demanding a DNA test before I buy drinks.)
If you want to see a great example of this, have a gander at all the affirming comments when American Atheists' PR head Dave Muscato came out as a transgender woman named Danielle, in spite of his headshot still showing him to be a balding, bearded dude. (American Atheists exists to deny that there is a God, but can't seem to find it in themselves to deny that there is a Danielle.)
This of course leads to all sorts of insane nonsense such as traditional women's colleges having to ask new students what they identify as and what personal pronouns they want to be addressed by. Even better, there's an even weirder subculture known as "otherkin," who self-identify as non-human. (And yes, that means that "otherkinphobia" is also a thing.)
As an English graduate, I find the (often torturous) changes to the language that result from the present age's most extraordinary popular delusion. Orwell was prophetic, but he didn't see the half of it coming.