Starting in December, New York City will allow citizens to change the gender listed on their birth certificates even if they haven’t had sex reassignment surgery. [Provided they have lived as the ‘new’ gender for at least two years and have medical affidavits.] To sum up the dispute, here’s a quote from the New York Times article on the topic.
I do wonder if jerks (one is mentioned near the end of the article) will try to exploit this system, but this strikes me as a great and forward-thinking move by the City of New York. What do the rest of you think?
It seems reasonable. I don’t agree with the person they quoted who believed the city should take this step without even requiring medical input, but the scheme as it now stands – a doctor and a mental health professional must agree; the person must have changes his or her name and lived as the new gender for at least two years; seem to draw a reasonable fence around the seriousness of the requested change.
Seems like a good solution for physically sex-questionable persons, assuming of course that the government makes you declare a gender at all, which I disagree with. People born with indeterminate organs or genes might decide that they want to be, or really are, the other gender.
What exactly is so serious about changing the letter on a piece of paper? The fence around the actual procedure is reasonable, but if a person can legally change their name to whatever they like as long as they’re not committing fraud, why not the same with this bureaucratic marker? After all, it also means they can just as easily change it back.
Okay, then it’s probably actually much, much easier to change it back.
The question isn’t whether gender has a role in our society, or whether it should be recognized. It’s what role and how, and how much personal freedom matters in answering those questions.
I disagree: I don’t see why government has to condone gender discrimination. There are no legal differences that I can think of that should be officially recognized by the government, except in the interests of preventing discrimination and that can be served by generic anti-discrimination legislation that does not draw a magical circle around protected classes.
Which is not to say that there aren’t more palatable ways to end gender discrimination than governmental recognition of same-sex “marriage” (I bring this up cause someone will eventually when I post this: ) even though the opponents of same-sex marriage are more wrong than those that are all for governmental-sanctioned marriage in word and fact, a word is so little to get worked up about that civil unions that would give all the rights of marriage would be a small price to pay to give bigots their cherished linguistic purity.
In short, I reiterate my argument that I do not see why government should recognize gender at all.
No, it would not be a “small price to pay” to “give bigots” anything at all. The price of giving bigots any ground at all is far too high. They will never be content with scraps, and will forever use those scraps to try to get another jackboot in the door of oppression.
I don’t know about government not recognizing gender at all, but I certainly agree that it shouldn’t dictate it. Now that I think of it, though, I can’t come up with a single good reason they should keep track of it. Bricker’s vague “gender matters” is hardly an answer, or an argument at all, for that matter. Many things matter that aren’t kept track of by the government.