Freedom to Choose Sex

Yes, I know that THE BIG STORY of the day is the elections.

Will the Dems' performance at the polls live up to the high expectations set by the lib media, pundits, and the candidates themselves?

That discussion will have to wait for a while, at least until the first bogus exit polls are leaked later today.

In the meantime, let's look at this truly bizarre story.

From The New York Times:

Separating anatomy from what it means to be a man or a woman, New York City is moving forward with a plan to let people alter the sex on their birth certificate even if they have not had sex-change surgery.

Under the rule being considered by the city’s Board of Health, which is likely to be adopted soon, people born in the city would be able to change the documented sex on their birth certificates by providing affidavits from a doctor and a mental health professional laying out why their patients should be considered members of the opposite sex, and asserting that their proposed change would be permanent.

Applicants would have to have changed their name and shown that they had lived in their adopted gender for at least two years, but there would be no explicit medical requirements.

How would applicants prove that they've lived as their "adopted gender" for two years?

What proof would they have? Two years' worth of receipts from Victoria's Secret?

“Surgery versus nonsurgery can be arbitrary,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the city’s health commissioner. “Somebody with a beard may have had breast-implant surgery. It’s the permanence of the transition that matters most.”

If approved, the new rule would put New York at the forefront of efforts to redefine gender. A handful of states do not require surgery for such birth certificate changes, but in some of those cases patients are still not allowed to make the change without showing a physiological shift to the opposite gender.

In other words, if one identifies oneself as a member of a gender, that's enough to be documented as male or female, even if that person hasn't had a sex change operation.

There aren't physical requirements to be deemed a male or female.

That's nuts (or no nuts, as the case may be)!
A birth certificate could be altered simply to reflect the individual's personal gender definition.

MAN! I FEEL LIKE A WOMAN!

This opens the door for a myriad of potential abuses and identity fraud.

I don't think it's a good precedent to allow alterations in such documents as birth certificates, based on how a people feel about their sexual identity.

There are other possibilities. If sex designation can be changed on a legal document, why not other information?

What if a woman decides that the year of birth stated on her birth certificate doesn't reflect how she feels in terms of her age?

Should she be allowed to change the year of her birth?

...Transgender advocates consider the New York proposal an overdue bulwark against discrimination that recognizes an emerging shift away from viewing gender as simply the sum of one’s physical parts. But some psychiatrists and doctors are skeptical of the move, saying sexual self-definition should stop at rewriting medical history.

“They should not change the sex at birth, which is a factual record,” said Dr. Arthur Zitrin, a Midtown psychiatrist who was on the panel of transgender experts convened by the city. “If they wanted to change the gender for all the compelling reasons that they’ve given, it should be done perhaps with an asterisk.”

I agree.

Sexual self-definition should not involve rewriting medical history.

I'm sure that the transgender community would never stand for an asterisk. That would be considered discriminatory.

...The Board of Health, which weighs recommendations drafted by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, is scheduled to vote on the proposal in December, and officials say they expect it to be adopted.

At the final public hearing for the birth certificate proposal last week, a string of advocates and transsexuals suggested that common definitions of gender, especially its reliance on medical assessments, should be abandoned. They generally praised the city for revisiting its 25-year-old policy that lets people remove the sex designation from their birth certificate if they have had sexual reassignment surgery. Then they demanded more freedom to choose.

Whether one is born a male or a female is not a matter of choice or how one feels.

It's a reality that isn't open for debate.

...Joann Prinzivalli, 52, a lawyer for the New York Transgender Rights Organization, a man who has lived as a woman since 2000, without surgery, said the changes amount to progress, a move away from American culture’s misguided fixation on genitals as the basis for one’s gender identity.

“It’s based on an arbitrary distinction that says there are two and only two sexes,” she said. “In reality the diversity of nature is such that there are more than just two, and people who seem to belong to one of the designated sexes may really belong to the other.”

How weird is that?

Recording a newborn's sex on a birth certificate is about documenting the facts.

It has nothing to do with the supposed "American culture’s misguided fixation on genitals as the basis for one’s gender identity."

The gender listed on a birth certificate is a matter of simple biology. It's not about a social crusade to completely blur the lines between the sexes. It's not about choice.

Playing with biological facts renders the documentation on a birth certificate meaningless.

The biological facts of one's sexual designation are not up for grabs.

Putting the very rare cases of human hermaphroditism aside, checking the male or female box on a legal document is not a difficult task.

The birth certificate is not meant to be a record of one's gender identity or what sex one wants to be.

Defining how one feels in terms of gender is a different matter from the facts of one's anatomy.

The birth certificate is a record of the sex of a baby when it's born.

It is what it is.