I agree that assigned is a bit of an inaccurate — and therefore misleading or somewhat dishonest - word.

But I do think that it's a more nuanced idea than you are recognizing, and think that Rex Kerr has articulated the problem extremely well in the comment thread that you two are having.

But the idea I'll offer here is: what if we used a slightly different word? For example, what if the question said, "What was your sex as arbitrated at birth?"

I think that very accurately describes what happens. We do our best to describe a person as female or male, based on the evidence at our disposal.

It sounds a little heavy handed though — so maybe it’d be best to simply ask what your sex was “as recorded” at birth. Because that is true beyond doubt. It is agnostic to the actual process of deciding the sex, but sticks merely to how it was originally listed in the records.

Some other words that come to mind are discern, ascertain, or recognize.

In software engineering, there is another term: coerce. This term is used when you need a value to be a certain type (e.g. an integer), even if it was originally a different type (e.g. a true/false value).

That's technically what we are doing here. We are taking something from nature, which is always a continuous variable, and coercing it to a binary concept (male / female).

I ultimately don't think coerce is a good word to use, because it is too technical, and has too negative a connotation (even more so than assign). But I do think one of those other words, like recorded, arbitrated or discerned, might make a lot of sense, rather than assigned.

What do you think?