Why exactly is society so hung up on allowing people to change the gender on their birth certificates or state ID/drivers license/passport?
Even in cases where there was an obvious typo it will get into the news, like a woman with kids finding out her birth cert calls her male and running into hell to change it.
What exactly is served by this? Gender even being recorded on ID? Is there really going to be some kind of rash of identity theft should it not be there?
Because one’s form of identification should be as accurate and correct as possible. If you identified as male, would you want your drivers’ license to list you as female or vice versa?
I don’t think there’s that much concern about how people are identified as individuals. The concern is over how people fit in to society. We have roles we feel men belong in and roles we feel women belong in so we want to identify whether somebody is a man or a woman so we know if they fit in that role. It ranges from issues of which public restroom you use to who you can marry.
We used to have similar rules related to race. Black people could do some things and white people could do some things. When we had those rules, we paid attention to identifying who was black and who was white. Now that there are few official areas divided by race, we’re much more informal about what race people are.
Yeah, I don’t get it.
Here in France, gender isn’t written on driving licences, and up to the 90’s it wasn’t mentioned on the national id card too (that changed when they switched from paper id cards to plastic id cards), and society had managed to function just fine as is.
It’s not so much that people care about what’s on their ID (although most people obviously do) but that people care what gender the government considers them. Even in very progressive countries, there is a myriad of subtle and not-so-subtle ways that the government treats you differently depending on your gender. For the most part, life is going to be much easier if the government considers you the same gender that you yourself do.
Gender isn’t recorded on ID. Sex is and that is because biological sex is one of the most fundamental ways that people can be differentiated. ID stands for ‘identification’ after all. Sex is only one of the key pieces of information that a typical government id contains. The others are birth date to determine age, height, possibly weight, eye color, hair color and maybe self-identified race on some types of id.
Some of those are used to help prevent fraud and others are basic information that are very useful to have in a database. You need age for law enforcement purposes as well as to determine eligibility for some government programs. Sex can be used in lots of different ways as well.
I found out a few years ago that everyone from the IRS to the Social Security Administration thinks I am exactly a year younger than I really am because my birth year was recorded incorrectly in the Social Security database when I was born and that is the master record for most other government agencies. I will have to get it fixed some day. By your logic, I could just say, ‘You are only as old as you feel’ but that isn’t true. Having my birth year recorded incorrectly determines my eligibility for lots of things later in life including social security benefits.
The same type of thing would apply if my sex was recorded incorrectly. You could argue that sex wouldn’t need to be shown on the physical id itself but that is just a superficial point. Most people don’t have a problem with showing it but the real ‘ID’ is the database records behind the scenes and it is almost mandatory for those to include sex for them to serve all the purposes that they need to.
Is it really a surprise that we use such a convenient and generally indisputable characteristic when describing and identifying people?
Indisputable? You gotta get out more. 