Double-Binding Up the Wounds
Queen Emily has an educational piece at Feministe about the danger of filling out forms if you are transgendered. In sum, there is no answer you can give which you can reasonably hope is safe for the circumstances. And many of the circumstances – health-care providers; law enforcement; travel – are potentially life-threatening.
(Via Ceri.)
Comment by TGGP —
July 5, 2009 @ 1:19 pm
Zoe Brain made some similar points in the comments to this GNXP post.
Comment by Andromeda —
July 5, 2009 @ 1:31 pm
I recently renewed my license here in MA, and was pleasantly surprised, while filling out the form, to note that next to the sex checkbox there is a procedure for if it has changed.
Buuuuut I live in MA. Maybe not representative.
Comment by dhex —
July 5, 2009 @ 5:56 pm
i’ll have to take a look at the nyc forms next week.
even though it’s something that only affects a minuscule portion of the population, there should probably be a greater standardization at least as far as anything that might intersect law enforcement issues. they’re always going to insist on some kind of a gender checkmark, after all (a somewhat defensible position…maybe) so something like the MA solution andromeda described might be the best bet.
Comment by The Angry Optimist —
July 6, 2009 @ 12:39 am
i’m sorry about the discrimination the author goes into, but it should occur to her that her body parts (not just genitals, by the way) will determine her path of medical treatment. If you check “female”, guess who’s not getting checked for prostate cancer? And guess who will be offered an unnecessary mammogram?
Comment by Jim Henley —
July 6, 2009 @ 1:07 am
So you read somewhere between zero and six paragraphs then.
Comment by Barry —
July 6, 2009 @ 10:22 am
Jim, he’s too angry to settle down and read, and he optimistically assumes that he knows it all already
The Sad Pessimist also didn’t read it, for for different reasons
Comment by The Angry Optimist —
July 6, 2009 @ 12:09 pm
Jim, I read the entire thing. So what’s your point? I was just offering the fact that there isn’t a good solution, especially WRT medical requirements.
*shrug* Read what you like into it.
Comment by Jim Henley —
July 6, 2009 @ 12:29 pm
Assuming you hadn’t read the whole thing was the only logical explanation I could come up with for the irrelevancy of your criticisms. The author makes clear that she has listed her gender both ways for health-care providers and gotten in trouble each time. The piece shows that bigotry on the part of health-care providers militates against transgendered patients providing complete information on their own biology or having it appropriately acted upon when they do. You are not engaging with the text, but with some right-wing preconception that the author must be an idiot whose political correctness or something leads her to deny the salience of biology.
The tragedy is that it really is the case that complete gender info is surely key to getting the best health care for trans patients, assuming the provider has any interest in providing it. And I’m learning that the biology of transgendering can be pretty complex, even before you take possible hormone-replacement therapy and other modifications into account. I do highly recommend TGGP’s link to the Gene Expression comments thread; I learned a lot about some of the biological wrinkles of transhood from Zoe Brain’s contributions to that thread. At the simplest level, we’d be unwise to assume that just because a trans woman was born with “block-and-tackle,” that her biological subsystems are as straighforwardly “male” as those of us who have never experienced gender dysphoria.
Comment by The Angry Optimist —
July 6, 2009 @ 2:16 pm
Jim, I am not engaging with the text because on that particular point, the text was a vacuous non-sequitur. Because there are some asshole medical providers out there, it follows that the need to know one’s sex characteristics is somehow outdated or silly? No, not even close. And your point doesn’t follow from the text either…actually, your point that biology in genetically predispositioned “trans” people is exactly the point the author should have made, rather than making a “I went to the South once and boy do they ALL HATE BLACK PEOPLE down there.”
So, yes, on a certain level, her complaints didn’t add anything new to the discussion, because the happenstance of ignorant medical practitioners does not vitiate the need to mark down one’s sex.
Comment by The Angry Optimist —
July 6, 2009 @ 2:21 pm
correction: “your point that biology in trans people is different is exactly the point that should have been made”. If there are substantive biological differences when it comes to transsexuals, then let that be the point that is made, not that some doctor acted like a bigoted fuck.
Comment by Ceri B. —
July 6, 2009 @ 7:04 pm
I took much of Emily’s point to be that we don’t need a lot of the sex and gender identification that people think of as necessary because routine. For general ID purposes, a photo and a few data points do it; for anything serious, it takes biometrics anyway. Unless we go to a phenomenological biometric system with room for “apparently good tits in favored tops”, “groinocological area seems well stuffed”, and “weak underdeveloped ass”, sex labels don’t actually really help in either kind of identification work.
Comment by joe from Lowell —
July 7, 2009 @ 4:47 pm
“I went to the South once and boy do they ALL HATE BLACK PEOPLE down there.â€
Vacuous nonsequitur.