Guest post: At least the Moon and stars actually exist
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on What does bullshit mean?
And there’s no obligation to “trust” that anyone is “who they tell you they are.” Do banks and government institutions do this when you’re filling out forms? No. They require proof of identity; that is “identity” as in being the individual human being you purport to be, not the “identity as inner sense of self=personality.”
Being compelled to believe what people tell you to believe is not a thing, unless you’re living in a dictatorship. Even then, in your heart of hearts, you have the right to doubt, the right to say “no.” Whether you can say so out loud is a test of your freedom.
As a matter of politeness, one might give a stranger the benefit of the doubt, that they are what they say they are. In casual conversation you’re not going to ask for diplomas and licences if someone tells you they’re a lawyer, a doctor or a pilot. But if you’re going on trial, under the knife, or stepping onto a plane, you’re assuming that someone, somewhere has asked for, and been provided with, the requisite credentials that certify that the person holding them has the training and knowledge entitling the lawyer, doctor, or pilot to plead your case, wield the scalpel, or fly the plane. Any time someone succesfully cons their way into any regulated profession without the proper training and vetting, it is treated as a major failure of the system in question, and rightly so. We regularly place our lives in the hands of such individuals; such fields of trust, skill, power and knowledge should be off limits to frauds, charlatans, and amateurs.
This is the danger of the so-called “right” to change one’s sex on a birth certificate or passport. Being “officially” declared the sex you are not is a legal fiction carried too far, and one that should be reversed. Immediately. Governments would never allow someone to “legally” claim to be a different height, or age, or species. Claiming to be the sex one is not is equally as impossible and nonsensical. Even without documentation, we’re supposed to believe that males who claim to be female are as safe to be around as women, that they are no longer men, so no longer a threat. “Trust me when I tell you who I am!” To quote some Olympic women weight lifters, “No thank you.”
Trans activists might wave around their wee scraps of paper that “declare” they are actually female when they are not, using them as licences to access facilities, spaces and opportunities to which they should have no right. but these doctored documents do nothing to change the facts of the matter, any more than the “incorporation” of a company magically creates an actual person, ex nihilo. Unlike the professions, there is no “training” or “skill” that lets you change sex. Things just don’t work like that, and all the lipstick and high heels in the world can’t change it. Such an edit might be validating and affirming on paper, but reality isn’t listening. Neither should we.
There are many larger issues at stake, alongside the safety of women and girls (which is large enough in itself.) Do we really want official government documents to be as malleable as a Wikipedia article? Do “gender fluid” folk get to have the sex indicated on their passports in pencil? Do we render our statistics and book-keeping null and void because some men are now legally “women?” It is a bad idea, a legal fiction taken too far. It’s not “kind” it’s not “inclusive” it’s just stupidity that will redound upon the legitimacy of government institutions themselves, rendering the basic identification information we are supposed to trust less believable and authoratative than one of those novelty certificates you can buy that grants you ownership of real estate on the Moon, or even a star. At least the Moon and stars actually exist.
Well put. And when certain crime statistics on women go up — say, violent crimes and sex crimes — will this cause any concern? We know the reason. Or will we all have to play some sort of dumb game and listen to experts in social sciences and criminality faux wringing their hands and throwing out possibilities which would only be considered if women — no, females — were actually all female.
“Could it be something in diet soft drinks, or maybe in pop dance videos or girls’ magazines, Bob?”
“Might be, might be. Though we can’t rule out the effects of feminism lifting women up to parity with men in this area, too. The sudden growth in women axe murderers could be an unintended result of progress,”
Trans people complain that they are mistreated at TSA checkpoints because the scans reveal something “anomalous” and they require additional security checks. So this actually is a security issue. When there’s a bulge where there shouldn’t be one, how does TSA know it’s not some kind of weapon? I don’t know much about those machines (and I actually despise them) but how can you expect the attendants to know you “feel like a woman” inside?
But if they do a pat down, they’ll discover that you don’t “feel like a woman” on the outside.
Amy, those things discriminate against me, too! Shouldn’t they know just by looking at me that my shoulders are made of metal? Why are they wasting my time doing a pat down, and treating me like a common criminal just because something shows on the machine?
Sounds like the excuse given for every ill. Oh, no, men are in lower numbers in colleges! It’s feminism, I tell you. (Never mind that the percentages of men going to college have remained steady; there are more women than men, it’s erasing men from education).
This is a letter to The Observer (today):
Sonia Sodha is right to expose the ludicrous naivety at the heart of Nicola Sturgeon’s reforms to the Gender Recognition Act in Scotland (“Sturgeon’s plans to reform gender law could leave Tories as the champions of women’s rights”, Comment).
As a transsexual, I am astonished and appalled that a bill purporting to extend trans rights compromises the rights of women and undermines the safeguarding of children. When distinguishing men from women, it is neither progressive nor practical to replace biological sex with self-identified feelings of gender – whatever gender might mean.
The people often forgotten, not least by those banging the drum for “trans rights”, are transsexuals. Legislation originally passed to protect people who had undergone a meaningful transition from harassment and discrimination may be extended to a much wider group, with no checks and balances against abuse. Few men might claim to be women to breach the boundaries that women have worked so hard to establish, but those that will choose to self-identify their way in are precisely the men that women need to worry about.
Sturgeon’s SNP and her Scottish Green collaborators are destroying the trust and confidence that transsexuals used to take for granted. This is a bad bill that must be opposed.
Debbie Hayton
Bristol