"Douglas Reay" <douglasr@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote in message
news:Bxg*dzDaq@news.chiark.greenend.org.uk...
> Amanda Angelika <manic_mandy@hotmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > BTW There is an easier to read version of this as well as the second day
> > text day http://tinyurl.com/yt9u3
>
>
> Hmm, what did you make of Baroness O'Cathain where she said:
>
> These amendments would at least have the virtue of allowing some leeway
> for people's consciences. Rather than being told by law that a man's sex
> becomes that of a woman, under these amendments the law would say that
> the man's sex becomes as if it were that of a woman. That recognises that
> there is a mental jump required from the factual reality to the legal
> reality. There must be room for many people who simply cannot, in all
> conscience, go along with that.
>
> At the moment there is an example in the news of a BBC programme in which
> a transsexual man was referred to as a man. Press for Change, the
> transsexual rights group is campaigning for the BBC always to refer to
> transsexuals in their chosen gender. That is indicative of the Orwellian
> nightmare that the Bill encourages. Will people who refuse to call a
> transsexual man a woman routinely face that kind of hostility? Given what
> we established yesterday, which is that the Government believe that many
> people change their minds and revert to their real gender, or oscillate
> between the two, how are people to know which gender a person wants to
> be known as at any particular time? I say again that it is absurd to say
> that a man can become for all purposes a woman or vice versa.
>
Which bit are you quoting and which bit is your comment on it, if any?
If you want to know what I think about it, I think it is one thing how
people's friends and contacts refer to one in private company, and quite
another how officialdom refer to one. It is presumably possible for you to
pick your friends and circle of acquaintances to include people who either
agree with you or like you enough to comply even if they don't go a bundle
on it themselves.
As a matter of public policy, however, it is simply impossible, as it says
in those two paragraphs above, to please everybody, and so the benchmark has
presumably to be that officially a person remains how they were born as far
as passports, etc are concerned. How that affects people who are so-called
intersexed is a tougher dilemma, but presumably the doctors wrote male or
female on their hospital document and either male or female is written on
their Birth Certificates.
Birth Certificates cannot be changed retrospectively anyway, so if the
gender on the passport is changed then there will always be a discrepancy.
You would need some kind of third document as an adjunct to the other two,
to cover why they didn't agree.
What was said about people oscillating between two sexes I think is a sort
of nonsense. If that were the case, people could marry themselves, and that
doesn't happen, so clearly it's a fiction. If you could be male and female
at the same time the ideal solution would be to marry yourself, as you could
hardly get another partner who would be so understanding and compliant as
yourself. You could also get two votes in elections and draw a double salary
at work, in those cases. Divorce would bve pretty messy, though. Clearly it
was to avoid such inequities that the British government recently withdrew
all tax benefits from the institution of marriage.
I think that people should be officially known as their birth sex for all
official reasons, with the exception , as always, that if a person's
practical needs are being impeded by that, a way can be found around that.
For example, you shouldn't normally have two passports, but it's an open
secret that businessmen who need to do business in Israel and also the Arab
states can apply, usually successfully, for an extra passport, which even
runs concurrently with their existing passport. If being in appearance
different from their birth sex causes people difficulty in travelling, etc,
then they can be given an additional passport. The name would need to be the
same, and the adapted name could be given in the notes section. Democracy
is not impeded, as we do not vote with our passports anyway, but with
our entries on the electoral register.
As to the Television, Radio, etc, I think whether the official birth sex is
used or the adopted sex will depend on the nature of the context. Obviously
when Dana International won Eurovision the context was not a dry, official
one, and there would have been no reason for Terry Wogan to call Dana 'he'.
(I can't remember whether he did or not, even though I was actually there in
the Birmingham NEC at the time.) whereas in an official report on the news
if a transsexual has been,say, in court, I think it is appropriate to refer
to the birth sex.
You can't change the day of your birth, and the sex of your birth is almost
always a matter of fact, whatever happens later.
That's my take on it.
Uncle Davey
www.usenetposts.com
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