U.S. to add ‘X’ gender marker on passports
19thnews.org
19thnews.org
Gender as a social institution is a separate thing to me from gender as a facet of identity. By "social institution" I mean its involvement outside of interpersonal relationships, e.g. in situations like this where it's become the business of the state (and thus information that anybody even glancing at your ID card is privy to). That's patently absurd to me. How is it normal for a complete stranger to look at my ID and know (or at least think they know) what genitals I have? Or casually ask for that on forms? That certainly seems like information that I should have a measure of control over.
For a few years now I've been of the opinion that a person should have to opt in to disclose their gender/sex except where actually necessary (e.g. in medical contexts). "Prefer not to disclose" (e.g. X along with M/F) should be a valid answer to anyone else that asks including the government.
Ignore naughty bits entirely! Everyone fixates on the naughty bits. Sheesh.
Imagine a 5'6" male. Imagine a 5'6" female. Imagine them wearing the same outfit. Do they look, stereotypically, different enough that you could tell which one is standing in front of you with high accuracy? Do you think this outward difference might be a useful identification tool to assess if a passport belongs to the passport holder? Must this indicator be sinister? Is it so sinister that the government should reject it for other, possibly more sinister indicators?
You mean rather than use the picture?
I would assume someone is trans if they matched the description and appearance on an identity document except for apparent sex.
Sinister is a straw man.
In my actual experience most people are neither broad-shouldered Adonises nor voluptuous femme fatales, and it only takes an unflattering angle or non-mainstream fashion choice (or even nothing but their own imaginations) for people to start questioning someone's sex.
You have some narrow stereotypes if you think just those bodies look distinctly male or female.
> it only takes an unflattering angle or non-mainstream fashion choice (or even nothing but their own imaginations) for people to start questioning someone's sex.
Let's assume that's true. Are most angles unflattering? Are most fashion choices non mainstream?
Sex literally is about "naughty bits". That is what it is, by definition. That is the information that we go about disclosing to all and sundry.
> Imagine a 5'6" male. Imagine a 5'6" female. Imagine them wearing the same outfit. Do they look, stereotypically, different enough that you could tell which one is standing in front of you with high accuracy?
If your system of identification depends on assessing people's (secondary) sex characteristics, it's pathetically bad.
So, no, this is not a good idea, especially not when taking that passport across the border - and why else do you get a passport if not to travel across international borders - to countries which have not been touched by the gender craze. What is an Indonesian police officer going to do with an American citizen who chose to mark her gender as 'X', took a few drinks too many and ended up unconscious on the street on Bali? How will a Russian doctor treat her when she comes with the aforementioned complaints about abdominal discomfort?
More importantly, what purpose is served by ignoring the above mentioned fact of the majority of people being born either male or female? Reality does not change just because someone chooses to ignore it.
It's generally more productive when people don't make such clear knee-jerk responses to comments.
Please read the whole entry before commenting about 'knee-jerk responses to comments*.
Should we start putting all of these things on general-purpose IDs as well, since medical personnel need to know them?
As an aside, it seems to me that it's only profoundly healthy people that wring their hands this much about sex in medical contexts. Those of us who actually have to pop in and out of hospitals fairly often know that there are a host of other things we would need a new doctor or nurse to know first, and know that there are already ways to communicate existing conditions to the people that need to know them: medical IDs.
In the case of the police officer, this might be a shock but I am 0% in support of taking unconscious, unresponsive people into custody and not to a medical facility (and it's frankly completely baffling once again that you seem to think that the police officer is supposed to process someone that is unconscious into jail. Just...what?).
[1] https://www.diabetes.co.uk/diabetic-products/medipal-card.ht...
[2] https://www.epilepsy.org.uk/info/daily-life/safety-aids-equi...
[3] https://www.dorsetccg.nhs.uk/Downloads/aboutus/medicines-man...
I don't mean to insinuate but I do have to ask if you're actually reading what I'm saying in good faith or just reacting.
I am reacting to the increasing trend of renormalisation of the exception to make it the new norm(al). If the new normal is not to denote sex in the passport this would mean that everyone would need to carry an additional document - like the medical IDs mentioned - to identify themselves as male or female to the aforementioned police officer [1] and doctor to avoid the mentioned risks.
[1] as to your earlier remark about me seem[ing] to think that the police officer is supposed to process someone that is unconscious into jail. Just...what? - realise that different countries have different norms, no matter what you may think of that. The Indonesian police officer will act according to Indonesian norms, not according to yours. While what you or I think about those norms is up to us, it is decidedly not up to us to dictate our norms to others.
So in essence you really are not paying attention to what I'm actually saying, you just have an axe to grind and are determined to grind it regardless of what I say.
If that's not the case, I'm very interested indeed to know how exactly you arrived at "everyone would need to carry an additional document" from "denoting your sex on general-purpose identification should be opt-in". To me it would seem patently obvious to anybody who is not jumping to argue that the only people who would need to carry additional papers are those who have chosen to (by deciding not to put their sex on their passports, driver's licenses or what have you).
I think it would be worth your while to interrogate why your kneejerk reaction to "it should be the individual's choice to disclose this information" is to translate it to "nobody should disclose this information".
> While what you or I think about those norms is up to us, it is decidedly not up to us to dictate our norms to others.
First of all I guarantee that we are not from the same country nor do we share norms. Second of all, it's not the norm in Indonesia to (for example) recognise same-sex marriages, but I fail to see how this is an argument about those in such marriages owning documents that reflect their union (or making their own decisions about where they can take those documents to and what workarounds they might need where their validity is not recognised). And finally I frankly do not understand what your point is with the police officer. What exactly happens to an unconscious woman in a street in Indonesia found by a police officer with an X in her passport as opposed to an F (or with no passport at all, which is by far the most likely option)?
This is in reaction to the proposition to not denote sex in ID documents at all as is proposed elsewhere in this discussion.
> First of all I guarantee that we are not from the same country nor do we share norms
You are assuming a lot here, both about where I am from as well as what my norms are. Don't do that, both because where we come from is of no concern but mostly because it makes it much more difficult to have an open discussion.
> Second of all, it's not the norm in Indonesia to (for example) recognise same-sex marriages, but I fail to see how this is an argument about those in such marriages owning documents that reflect their union (or making their own decisions about where they can take those documents to and what workarounds they might need where their validity is not recognised).
In which way is this related to my suggestion that it is not up to you or me to impose our standards on e.g. Indonesia? If the fictional couple in your example were to go to Indonesia they would be treated according to Indonesian norms no matter what their own ideas would be, just like they would be treated according to Swedish norms in Sweden, Indian norms in India and Russian norms in Russia.
> And finally I frankly do not understand what your point is with the police officer. What exactly happens to an unconscious woman in a street in Indonesia found by a police officer with an X in her passport as opposed to an F (or with no passport at all, which is by far the most likely option)?
If the woman with the X in her passport were to look somewhat like a man [1] she could end up in a holding cell with men. As to whether it is far more likely she would not be carrying a passport at all is doubtful given that she is travelling abroad and as such will be carrying one by necessity. In many places it is mandatory to carry ID, both foreign and domestic, at all times.
In the past, the doctor would just pick a gender, and then (in the case of ambiguous genitalia) perform surgery on the child to make their genitalia conform to the norms for the gender that the doctor chose. This is a bit of a crapshoot, since you don’t know if you made the right choice for that child.
This is the demarcation problem rearing its ugly head again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarcation_problem
If you decide that all people are either male or female, you are going to end up arguing about where to draw the line. This is not particle physics, gender does not take “integer values” like the spin of a boson. So we add “X” to the passport to acknowledge the fact that, as much as some people may wish for gender to be a simple binary, reality sometimes defies simple categorization.
"intersex" isn't a precondition to put X on a passport, so it's irrelevant. If gender is irrelevant, then remove it from the passport all together.
I think you may be reading something I didn’t write. I’m certainly neither saying nor implying that being born intersex is or should be a necessary condition for having “X” on your passport.
> If you decide that all people are either male or female, you are going to end up arguing about where to draw the line. This is not particle physics, gender does not take “integer values” like the spin of a boson. So we add “X” to the passport to acknowledge the fact that, as much as some people may wish for gender to be a simple binary, reality sometimes defies simple categorization.
But "X" doesn't really solve that problem, especially because this is an area where some people want near-infinite gradations, and because there can be differing opinions about how "X" should be used.
The demarcation problem is unavoidable. The real criteria here should be practicality and the suitability of the passport for its intended purpose. I can see "X" as solving some clear practical problems, but on the other hand, using self-identification for any field including sex creates them [1].
[1] And I can see arguments for self identification for almost all passport fields. Name? I might feel more affinity to a non-official name, but lack the resources to change it (or change it as frequently as I would like, or have as many as I'd like). Birth date? Maybe I don't identify more strongly with the Islamic, Chinese, or Julian calendar than the Gregorian one; and want my birth date in my calendar of choice. Place of birth? I may have grown up elsewhere or "adopted" another place, and want that listed because that better reflects my identity.
But we can come up with something a bit more reasonable than the M/F binary.
> And I can see arguments for self identification for almost all passport fields.
This isn't relevant. The desire for self-identification is not a sufficient reason to let people change fields on their passport in the first place.
Think of it more like hair color. You can dye your hair any color you like, or shave your head, and your passport will simply reflect what hair color you happen to have. It's not necessary to know what hair color someone was born with. People can self-determine their hair color, but all that really means is that they can dye it, or if your hair is in the middle between blond and brown, you can write down either option (your choice).
But it is a good example of a false dichotomy:
If the border officials are willing to perform a strip search, it cuts the number of people that could use a given fake ID roughly in half.
When we compare that to the chance the ID is a good enough fake to pass otherwise but bad enough that it doesn't have the gender right and the chance that it's just bureaucratic error, a mandatory genital inspection makes very little sense.
And that's before we get to the practical costs of making border guards into dick inspectors. We could hypothetically get to your 50% number by just inspecting everybody's genitals, I guess. Except the false positive rate from turning security guards into medical experts would be through the roof.
It's absurd to think that if the photos and other identity markers match, some TSA agent is going to insist that you drop trou so he can decide whether you're sufficiently manly to use your own ID.
Pictures on IDs are generally years/decades old. I'm sure that anyone can sit in a plane with someone else (non biometric) ID without any issue at all. Hell, my son is literally 2 months old on its ID photo and this thing is valid for 10 years !
Really? I thought child passports were only valid for 5.
In this case "they" has priority. We've been using it as a singular pronoun for longer than people have used X as a variable. Chaucer used singular "they" in the 14th century; X as a variable is generally credited to Descartes in the 16th.
I don't really have a strong opinion on this new sense of the word, but I do really dislike falsely involving Chaucer when pushing it.
Edit: This is the sort of disingenuous argumentation I'm talking about. Every single usage I saw skimming through did not refer to a single, known person:
https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/200700#eid18519864
The word evolves, as all words evolve. But there's no point in saying that this specific distinction means that Chaucer wouldn't have recognized the use and instantly figured it out. Chaucer used they as a singular noun, and it makes perfect sense to apply that to specific individuals. It doesn't make sense to say that because Chaucer didn't use the word in precisely this fashion, it invalidates the very similar senses in which it was used.
I'm honestly not sure what your point is in your second paragraph. My point is that Chaucer did not use "they" in the sense you're talking about. You're saying that people are now trying to use it in a very similar sense to how Chaucer used it. So we agree?
I don't disagree that it's a very similar sense, but that doesn't mean it's identical. So instead of invoking Chaucer, just say "it's close enough already, so let's just use it"
That's been said many times. There are people who, nonetheless, say it's incompatible with previous usage. Such people are, demonstrably, completely fucking stupid. That's what the Chaucer is there for. Not that it helps, because nothing helps against complete fucking stupidity.
Regardless, I appreciate the straightforwardness of your first paragraph.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recency_illusion
It has a few references there that I have not confirmed myself but it does list a reference to Shakespeare.
"There's not a man I meet but doth salute me / As if I were their well-acquainted friend"
For example: "Here is Bob, a builder. They are moving here to find work in construction."
I'm mostly indifferent about pronouns, but I wouldn't call someone "they" also because it's too much like the royal "we". Unless they are royalty of course.
Is this an international first, by the way? If so, I wonder if other countries will adopt this "X" designation
Now, should it be on there? Maybe? But if it must be, having an opt-out option is important, because people may not look male or female, rendering making identification less accurate. That's before we get into gender, where forcing someone to pick male or female when they may be neither is rather dehumanizing.
Do American passports have all those things?
I don't see any of those printed on mine in any obvious way. There are no fields for them like there is for sex. They could be in the electronic information, though, or encoded in the long string of digits at the bottom of the passport.
Some do. My driver's license is a also a passport card and has all of those except skin color.
Also even today US government discriminates against women when issuing visas in certain countries.
The really radical thing to do would be to only issue passports with an X in the "sex" field. That way non-binary people wouldn't be treated any differently.
And I'm pro LGBT+.
HN being curated.
However, if you want examples of non-binary sex, that exists too: it's called intersex.
I don't think anyone's claiming that "biological sex is a spectrum", but some people "do not fit the typical definitions for male or female bodies". Some are born with ambiguous external genitalia, but there are also people who look completely female while having male (XY) chromosomes. Since various distinct medical conditions are involved, it doesn't make sense to call it a "spectrum" even from a medical point of view.
Ichthyology is interesting. Clownfish, for example, are born (sexually) male. In a given group of clownfish, the largest will become female. This is a physiological change. However, it’s not “genderfluidity” because clownfish, like most animals, do not have gender.
Gender, since it is a purely social construct, is somewhat arbitrary to begin with and depends on cultural norms. Saying that sex and gender is equivalent is asserting that a particular set of cultural norms is correct and other norms are incorrect, and it’s a common anti-trans talking point. If you got downvoted, it’s probably because you were repeating some of those tired talking points—in your words, “males are males” and “the differences in the brain could be described as a mental illness”.
Gender dysphoria could be considered a mental illness, but it could equally be considered a social / environmental problem. From a harm reduction standpoint, the general consensus is that it can be easier for someone to transition to a different gender rather than try to treat gender dysphoria itself as a pathology. In other words, is gender dysphoria pathological, or is it a manifestation of a problem in the environment? Based on the evidence from treatment outcomes, it seems obvious that treating gender dysphoria as a mental illness is not clinically useful, at least in general.