Definitions are exclusionary by definition
First of all the headline.
Narrow legal definition of sex in Montana bill would jeopardize protections for trans people
What “narrow”?!! It’s just the definition. A small set of people are trying to force all of us to “broaden” the definition so that it means nothing. If sex stops meaning “female/male” then it’s just random. (Of course there are other meanings of “sex,” in particular the activity, but the definition PBS means here is the one that names female or male.)
A bill advancing through Montana’s statehouse would legally define a man as someone who produces sperm and a woman as someone who produces eggs — and apply that definition to 40 aspects of the state’s legislative code, from employment protections and school sports teams to burial records and marriage licenses.
The 60-page bill, which is being considered in the House after being passed by the state Senate on March 17, is an extreme example of a trend growing across the country this year: anti-trans bills that focus on narrowly defining sex.
But it’s no more “narrowly” than excluding bananas and peaches from the definition of “cherries” or rabbits and raccoons from the definition of “birds.” Definitions are a kind of thing you don’t want to make wider or broader, because then they can’t do the work of defining. It sounds conservative in the sense of mean and pinched and joyless, this business of “narrowly” defining sex, but that’s a rhetorical ploy. Definitions are necessarily narrow; a “liberal” definition is a useless definition.
LGBTQ+ advocates say it’s part of an attempt to totally push transgender people out of public life by excluding them from as many areas of law as possible.
If that really is what LGBTQ+ advocates say then they’re lying. The attempt is to prevent addled “activists” from defining women out of our rights.
“With SB 458, they’re just jumping right to the finish line,” said SK Rossi, a longtime LGBTQ+ activist and lobbyist based in Montana. “They essentially just decided to wipe us from the code . . . which means you actually can’t function in public spaces or public systems as yourself without either lying to the state or to your local government about the gender you were given at birth, or misgendering yourself at every juncture of your public life.”
Wut? Where does the necessity to lie to the state or to your local government about the gender you were given at birth come in? The point is to tell the truth about the gender/sex you were determined to be [not “given”] at birth.
Logan Casey, senior policy researcher and adviser for the Movement Advancement Project, which monitors LGBTQ+ policy, has tracked 15 active bills introduced this year across 11 states that aim to define, or redefine, sex…Not every bill is focused on defining men and women by their reproductive capacities, but all aim to make a legal distinction between men and women based on their characteristics at birth.
Because that’s the distinction that counts. People don’t pop out male and then become female 10 or 20 or 50 years later. It doesn’t work that way.
Shawn Reagor, director of equality at the Montana Human Rights Network, said that the state has seen a “disturbing” rise in the quantity and harm of anti-LGBTQ+ bills compared with its last legislative session — and that more Republicans are rallying around them.
Montana’s proposed bill to define sex creates many unknowns, Reagor said — how it would be funded, how it would be implemented and how it would be enforced. It has the potential to impact transgender people in nearly all parts of their day-to-day life — through housing protections, identity documents, employment and health care.
“It entirely eliminates the existence of intersex people. It tries to force trans and nonbinary folks to misidentify their gender. And it has huge implications for the rest of the state, taking us back hundreds of years,” he said.
Hundreds of years? So we’ve had these new exciting progressive definitions of “women” and “men” for hundreds of years? Any citations for that?
Ezra Ishmael Young, who teaches constitutional law at Cornell Law School, said Montana’s bill clearly violates the state’s own constitution, as well as the federal Constitution. In the 1970s, Montana added an “individual dignity” clause to its constitution — stating that “no person shall be denied the equal protection of the laws” or discriminated against by the state on the basis of sex.
Montana’s Supreme Court has held that the plain meaning of the dignity clause protects the intrinsic worth and basic humanity of its citizens — which is “directly at odds with what this bill aims to do,” Akilah Maya Deernose, staff attorney at the ACLU of Montana, told reporters at a virtual briefing on Wednesday.
I don’t see it. That’s a less batshit claim than many of these claims, but I still think it’s wrong. I don’t think the worth and basic humanity of people relies on a right to lie about oneself and force everyone else to agree with the lie. In fact I think this line of argument pulls in the other direction – I think it’s infantilizing. It amounts to saying we all have to humor everyone’s delusions about the self, when a huge part of growing up involves shedding delusions about the self. “Oh, actually, I’m not more important than everyone else, I’m not more special than everyone else, I don’t deserve better treatment than everyone else, I’m not a miraculous miracle compared to everyone else.”
What a trick they’re trying to play here, claiming that it is “redefining” sex by giving it the definition it always had. This is a strictly biological definition; without it, we struggle to talk about the way the world actually works.
As to what it would look like, and how it would be enforced, well, what about all those years that men weren’t in women’s bathrooms or on women’s sports teams or in women’s prisons? That’s what it would look like. How would it be enforced? By removing men when they invade women’s bathrooms or women’s sports teams or women’s prisons. In short, something we’ve been doing for a long time, and they’re acting like it would have some sort of strange new impact in our world, when in reality they are the ones trying to enforce something different and strange…and enforcing it by silencing women.
People seem to have confused the upholding of a “narrow defintion” of sex with enforcing a narrow definition of sex roles. As if having a clear definition of what a woman is will somehow make all women less free, when in fact the only thing it will do is make some men less entitled.
Strict legal distinctions between the sexes by themselves don’t lead to discrimination — it’s laws that unfairly discriminate on the basis of sex that do that. In fact, we need strict legal distinctions between the sexes in order to identify and prevent unfair discrimination. And sometimes we need laws that do discriminate on the basis of sex in order to uphold fairness — in sports, for example.
We can’t just make it all go away by banning the definitions of words and forcing everyone to pretend they don’t see sex. All we end up pretending not to see is sexism.
The intent of the bill from its sponsor:
Source: Montana Senate endorses bill to codify definition of biological sex in state law
If that really is the text of the law, then it is poorly written as it defines infertile people as neither male nor female, irrespective of their anatomy. But we can look up the text of the bill, and see that it actually states:
(a) “Female” means a member of the human species WHO, under normal development, HAS XX CHROMOSOMES AND produces OR WOULD PRODUCE relatively large, relatively immobile GAMETES, or EGGS, during her life cycle and has a reproductive and endocrine system oriented around the production of THOSE GAMETES. AN INDIVIDUAL WHO WOULD OTHERWISE FALL WITHIN THIS DEFINITION, BUT FOR A BIOLOGICAL OR GENETIC CONDITION, IS FEMALE. (b) “Male” means a member of the human species WHO, under normal development, HAS XY CHROMOSOMES AND produces OR WOULD PRODUCE small, mobile gametes, or sperm, during his life cycle and has a reproductive and endocrine system oriented around the production of THOSE GAMETES. AN INDIVIDUAL WHO WOULD – 2023 68th Legislature 2023 OTHERWISE FALL WITHIN THIS DEFINITION, BUT FOR A BIOLOGICAL OR GENETIC CONDITION, IS MALE.
The capitalised sections are new text, and I have removed the text that was to be replaced. Anyway, we see PBS’s summary of the definition is not accurate, as the text includes (slightly clunky) language to include the infertile.
That’s “extreme”?
Holocaust comparisons and claims of impending trans genocide in 3, 2, 1…
First, my understanding is that people with DSD don’t like the term “intersex” which is a misnomer. My understanding is that the various DSD conditions are particular to each sex, meaning that they’re different for each sex, not some sort of amorphous state where people aren’t either sex (which is what trans activists would have us believe). The legislation doesn’t “eliminate” anyone’s “existence.”
It confronts people with the fact that they cannot change sex. This should not be any more surprising or disturbing than being confronted with the fact that one cannot change species or become invisible. To insist otherwise is to be delusional or a liar. Grow the fuck up.
Is it “dignified” demanding to be treated as something or someone you are not and can never be? Maybe if you redefine “dignity.” Ignoring imaginary “gender” doesn’t discriminate against anyone.
Yes, I’ve seen a presentation (by Jane Clare Jones?) that determined trans accusations of feminist “bioessentialism” were claims that the feminist position insists that only women should be permitted to “enjoy” “female” sex roles and that they’re attempting to police “femininity.” If the trans position is so dependent upon sexist, patriarchal stereotypes, they can’t really allow their opponents to proceed with their project of blowing up those roles altogether. Crucially, trans activists can’t even acknowledge that this is what feminism’s goal actually is without pointing out how that very dependence is the core of their belief. Trans activists are supposed to be the “liberating” everyone by “smashing the binary,” though I’ve never heard how exactly that works.
That last bit is not inclusive enough, IMHO. What about the tough and hardened backwoods Montana timbercutters who have lost their male external genitalia in a chainsaw accident.? Believe me, it can happen.! So what about them.?
I thought sex and gender were supposed to be different. They say it so often, and with such a sneer, that I don’t think I got that wrong. So this law says nothing about how they or anyone else identifies their gender — it deals only with sex. In fact, the law is at pains to distinguish between sex and gender.
Which is probably why the howls. If they want to use the bathrooms and sports teams and prisons and shelters they prefer, they’ve now got to make laws that specifically replace sex with “gender.” They can’t just add it in as if there’s no conflict. They’ll have to make a legitimate case for gender being more significant by starting off with definitions that don’t start sliding into confusing it with sex, thus riding on the back of its credibility and legitimacy. They’ll have to be persuasive and convincing to the average person.
Just in what’s quoted here they talk about having to lie “about the gender we were assigned at birth.” Wasn’t that “sex” just a minute ago?I thought “gender” and “sex” were different.
Sastra @# 7:
Never in the history of human endeavour has semantics been so politically important as it is today. ‘Gender’ should refer to French verbs and other such grammatical matters, lest it become the means whereby male rapists, spivs, shonks, and poseurs of every other description gain access to facilities such as washrooms and dunnies previously exclusively womens’.
Misuse of the word ‘gender’ creates an ecological niche just waiting to be filled, and in real time and real life it sooner or later will be. Nature abhors a vacuum.
Excellent points! Somebody has nailed their jello to the wall and they have to define their terms precisely and carefully. They can’t rely on the sleight of hand and elision that has served them so well until now. The law has taken them at their word (or at least one of them), and it shows how trans activists have been trying to have it both ways at once. Now they have to choose. Now they will have to try to actually earn what they’ve taken for granted as their own all along.
Sastra:
This is precisely the rhetorical trick in persuasive definitions and concept creep. We see it here, and we see it with all the moral words co-opted by the Critical Social Justice crowd: inclusion, exclusion, discrimination, racism, rights, community, equality, etc. The new definition piggybacks on the moral, emotional, and intellectual cachet of the original. It’s effective in the short term and highly damaging in the long term, as that cachet is actually stolen from the original. The original word loses its efficacy and significance as people start to say, “Sure, whatever, I’m a racist,” and go about their day.
Yes, and I think it’s the hook that pulled me into this dispute: the endless dishonest wordplay. If I’m a fanatic about anything it’s language, and I really despise the manipulation of language for corrupt political ends.
I see Kansas has a similar conflict.
It is infuriating how the trans advocates are so stuck on the definition issue, they can’t allow for protections as trans-identified people per se, it’s imperative that they be covered under the “sex” definition, and if they aren’t covered that way a lot of people will kill themselves.