isms are systems of thought, enshrined in institutions, and part of the way out of them is to rein in the institutions Q: why does ID have "M/F" on it? A: to indicate whether you can legally vote or own property, and who you can marry, etc
Getting bureaucracies out of the business of tracking sex and gender
20 tweets · August 2023 · 123 likes · 2 retweets · read on Twitter
legal sex used to be important to keep track of! the laws were organized around sex, so you couldn't enforce the laws unless there was a *definitive answer* to someone's sex. hence the bureaucracy HAD TO "assign sex at birth" to intersex folks.
rather than patching the bureaucracy's ontology with an "X" or "other" category, and allowing trans folks to switch their M/F... ...let's get the bureaucracies out of the business of tracking peoples' sex and/or gender at all!
in many contexts, the question of sex/gender isn't even relevant when it is, it can mean a slightly different thing each time and that's fine! we can let the ontologies be naturally fluid by not trying to constrain them all to one legalistic notion
many clothing stores have women's and men's sections, but I regularly shop in the women's section because that's where the flamboyant flowy clothing is often found! does that make me a woman? yes! but also no!
and emojis have exactly three genders, which are of course: - 💆♀️ long hair & purple shirt - 🤷♂️ short hair & blue/green shirt - 🤦 medium hair & orange/white shirt (race & gender for emojis were a huge mistake but that's another story 🤠)
your doctor needs to know things like "do you have a menstrual cycle?"; pronoun-wise they can just call you "you" (and sometimes "women" is good shorthand here. many less-educated "people with uteruses" may not know they're in that category, and miss PSAs as a result)
someone who might want to date you needs to know if you feel like their type, physically and in terms of social role vibe ...which you might not, even *if* your identity or your body parts wouldn't rule that out
in the previous tweet, I went to try to say "your legal sex" but part of what I'm trying to point at here is the badness of that concept! legal names are also kind of bad tbh, although they're sort of necessary for data-tracking but uhh fuck *this* 👇
hmmm okay while writing this I came across some stories about women being assaulted in "women-only" prisons by uhhh another prisoner with a penis so insofar as the law thinks that eg prisoners not getting pregnant is important, there's a need to track that somehow
but I don't think that contradicts what I'm saying. in various places people are allowed to modify not just their current ID but their *birth certificate* to say something non-obvious which of course will be used as justification to do things that are clearly dumb
ID-changes leads to a verbal legal truth "this person is a woman" which then suggests various things that undermine some of the reasons we might want to track such a question in the first place
now, one case I'm looking at ("Karen White") was sent to the women's prison (*for extreme sexual crimes against women*) on the basis of self-identification only so treating self-identification as the absolute truth-for-all-contexts is also clearly dumb
what I'm concluding here is that the idea that there is *anybody*—the law, or the person's self-report, or anyone else—that is the arbiter of truth on someone's sex or gender *for all purposes* is an error
there are many purposes and there is no answer that is relevant to all purposes
(and at the stage when we're going to dehumanize people already by sending them to a prison, we can ask them what genitals they have without too much additional hardship? like of all the places to put some of the weirdness, that seems pretty good to me)
unlike with race, whose notional existence in the first place is pseudo-scientific bullshit, sex is a real & relevant fact of biology (even if there are edge-cases) but sex does NOT have to be a real fact of most laws, and when it does, we can think harder & get more specific
however, the relevance of sex in human life is changing—on the biological level itself—with birth control pills and contraceptives more generally! twitter.com/HephaistosF/st…
there a lot of other changes that are affecting this as well, such as a decrease in the role of physical labour in developed countries, increases in wealth and abundance and specialization leading to overall fewer people having kids & people having fewer kids
am I missing something about why peoples' sex needs to be registered with the government and printed on ID? lmk I haven't thought much about implications for census & statistics but ehh a lot of statistics are fake anyway