Or some combination of identities
Exciting news: the UK has its first ever “gender-fluid” police officer.
A police officer has become Britain’s first gender-fluid officer and is using separate male and female identities while at work.
One some days the officer goes by the name Callum — and on other days goes by the female name of Abi.
The transgender PC has two warrant cards, one in their male name, the other in their female identity.
See what I mean about exciting? I suppose Abi shows up in pink tutus and a mop of curls, while Callum is in camouflage gear and a full beard?
Gender fluid is a gender identity which refers to a gender which varies over time. A gender fluid person may at any time identify as male, female, neutral, or any other non-binary identity, or some combination of identities.
Their gender can also vary at random or vary in response to different circumstances. It comes as part of the Met Police’s diversity initiative encouraging officers to “be themselves” at work.
Cool.
The thing I don’t get though is…so what? What is anyone supposed to do about it? Why bother to announce it?
Unless…are we assuming women and men are so profoundly different that it’s necessary to adjust our behavior and way of talking according to other people’s gender? Do Abi-Callum’s colleagues need to know their gender at any particular moment in order to interact with them appropriately or correctly or otherwise according-to-gender?
Because if so – what about the rest of us? What, especially, about women? What about women, who have been trying for decades to get the world to stop relating to us as if we were defective and incomplete and not too bright? What about us if we don’t want to be simpered at or whispered to or coaxed along or flirted with or patronized or sidelined?
Or to put it another way, where does gender-fluid end and self-absorbed begin?
Why should anyone care what Abi-Callum thinks their gender status is at any given moment? I don’t suppose cops generally make official announcements of their moods every few seconds, so why does Abi-Callum need to tell us about these shifting flowing fluxing “genders” that actually just sound like moods?
Callum, who had been a male male police officer for 13 years, told the Sun: “The first time I walked into a Met building as Abi, I was hyperventilating so much I almost passed out. “I’ve done it a handful of times since and felt so happy that I got to be me at work.
“Abi is a part of me that exists and I want that part to be recognised and validated. “But I’m still me. I’m still the same person whether I’m presenting as Callum or Abi. It’s the same dice. You’re just looking at a different number.”
Yeah see that’s what I object to, that wanting one’s various “parts” to be recognised and validated. That’s ridiculous. We don’t have to go around recognizing and validating everyone. Between friends, ok, they can validate each other if they want to, but people at large? No. How would we ever get anything else done, just for one thing? Who has time to recognize and validate all the people we come in contact with?
Besides I don’t want to. Nobody should want to. It’s just self-obsession, and self-obsession sucks. We need a new woke progressive thing where we stamp out self-obsession. There’s nothing the lest bit progressive about it, after all, and progressives have other work to do. The hell with people’s “genders” and what name they are today and being validated. It’s a big world, and nobody’s Self is the center of it.
I know people whose work is in the realm of domestic violence/sexual assault (DV/SA). It is a fact that the vast majority of DV/SA acts are committed by men against women – or, one could say, males against females. While I live in the U.S., I think I can say with surety that the same holds true in Great Britain.
My question is about procedure. Let us suppose that members of the Met wish to interview a female victim of DV/SA, and this person requests that she speak only with a woman officer. Would it be at all proper for Abi to be sent in, as they served as a male for 13 years? What if Abi came in, and the victim said, “I mean a WOMAN” – what then?
I have no animus against a person living freely as who they are, but we’re talking about a cop here.
Callum/Abi has stumbled upon a startling realisation: people can have more than one behavioural setting! Over the course of a day, perhaps as we shift from work environments to social, people can change gears and act differently, almost as if people are not boringly uniform in character. Some might describe this as ‘mood’ or ‘not being one-dimensional drones’… but then, those people are cis and therefore ignorant.
And hey, does anyone else have a sneaking suspicion that Callum and Abi happen to correlate with the behaviours that are stereotypically considered male / female respectively?
Then that victim would be a bigot. I know, I’ve read Pharyngula.
This is the same question I have about my school’s bathroom policy, which is a version of “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” If you see someone in the “wrong” bathroom, don’t say anything, because they are probably trans. So, I am a woman who has been physically, emotionally, verbally, and sexually assaulted by men. While I can be around men without problems in most settings, a bathroom is a place where women are very vulnerable. So I see a great big bearded fellow come in to the women’s room, and I have to tell my PTSD “don’t worry, that person almost certainly identifies as a woman”?
And forget me – I have been through enough years of therapy that I could struggle through by just refusing to go into that bathroom anymore, since our building happens to have a single occupancy unit. What about a young girl who is forced into this situation at grade school? She might fail to validate the identity of the person who says they are female, even while being obviously male-bodied (oops, I just used a TERF phrase, right? Hang me from the highest tree), and then she is a bigot rather than a scared little girl. There is no one to validate her identity as a victim of abuse, because they are too busy validating the identity of the person who now identifies as Joan instead of John.
SOS. Self-obsession sucks. Very true. I wonder what action the SOS movement can take, though. We tried not watching The Apprentice and look where that got us.
What then? Something like this.
You’d think Abi-Callum’s situation would demonstrate the need for ‘de-gendering’ the work place. Instead we keep the gender apartheid in place and issue vaulting poles to the people who should be hefting battering-rams.
If you could only see my smile right now. My face is hurting.
What’s this “take your whole self to work” nonsense? There are parts of the “whole self” that are not appropriate in a professional situation. For example, a cop is expected to exhibit calm in stressful situations, no matter what he or she feels inside. It’s fine (indeed healthy) to express anxiety when off the job, but if you can’t suppress that during working hours, you either need therapy or a new career.