That might all be true but it is still rather stupid to refer to it as
‘X’ sex markers
in a headline rather than something more descriptive of the actual meaning, not the implementation detail of passport forms considering a lot of people are either not in the US (such as the Guardian writing this) or have never needed to apply for a passport.
I don’t really follow what you’re trying to say. “Sex marker” does describe the meaning in the most straight forward way one can.
“Sex marker” has a pretty unambiguous meaning. It’s something anyone of even low intelligence should be able to figure out from context. It’s a marker that indicates sex on a document. If not, the term is easily searchable. And the term applies to any ID document, not just passports.
People need to learn new words all the time; we’re not born knowing vocabulary. This isn’t even something that requires a lot of theory or justification like oddball neopronouns or something. It’s a pretty straightforward thing. If you have any kind of ID, it almost certainly has a sex marker on it.
Do we need to exhaustively define every word in a headline? There will always be some people who don’t know the meaning of any given word. What if someone grew up in the tropics, never had an education, and doesn’t know what freeze means? Should we expect the headline to provide a definition for that word as well? Or hell, why should we simply assume the reader knows what a passport is? “Sex marker” is a pretty common term. More people probably need to look up who Marco Rubio is than need to search what “sex marker” means.
Ultimately in order to make text at all readable and headlines at all concise, you need to assume some basic intelligence by the reader. You cannot exhaustively define each and every term. You don’t want to use incredibly obscure terms. But “sex marker” is hardly obscure. And it is something that can be learned very quickly with even an iota of effort.
That might all be true but it is still rather stupid to refer to it as
in a headline rather than something more descriptive of the actual meaning, not the implementation detail of passport forms considering a lot of people are either not in the US (such as the Guardian writing this) or have never needed to apply for a passport.
I don’t really follow what you’re trying to say. “Sex marker” does describe the meaning in the most straight forward way one can.
“Sex marker” has a pretty unambiguous meaning. It’s something anyone of even low intelligence should be able to figure out from context. It’s a marker that indicates sex on a document. If not, the term is easily searchable. And the term applies to any ID document, not just passports.
People need to learn new words all the time; we’re not born knowing vocabulary. This isn’t even something that requires a lot of theory or justification like oddball neopronouns or something. It’s a pretty straightforward thing. If you have any kind of ID, it almost certainly has a sex marker on it.
Do we need to exhaustively define every word in a headline? There will always be some people who don’t know the meaning of any given word. What if someone grew up in the tropics, never had an education, and doesn’t know what freeze means? Should we expect the headline to provide a definition for that word as well? Or hell, why should we simply assume the reader knows what a passport is? “Sex marker” is a pretty common term. More people probably need to look up who Marco Rubio is than need to search what “sex marker” means.
Ultimately in order to make text at all readable and headlines at all concise, you need to assume some basic intelligence by the reader. You cannot exhaustively define each and every term. You don’t want to use incredibly obscure terms. But “sex marker” is hardly obscure. And it is something that can be learned very quickly with even an iota of effort.