The State Senate is debating the transgender public accommodations bill tomorrow. And just in time, Senator Bruce Tarr (R-Gloucester) has come up with a new approach. We don’t often think of the Senator as an advocate of increased governmental paperwork, but he can surprise.
The Senator’s idea is that if you have gone through a gender reassignment procedure you can have your birth certificate amended to reflect the change. And so simple — all it takes is an affidavit from you that you have (or once had) gender dissonance and an affidavit from your doctor that something was done about the problem. And voila, you can have a birth certificate that establishes a rebuttable presumption of your sincerely held gender identity. So the next time when you use the restroom in a public place, you’ll have your rebuttable presumption ready like everybody else and won’t have to worry about being hassled.
n/t
but no. It is for real.
Birth certificates reflect circumstances at the time of birth, but isn’t there already paperwork to reflect the name change that generally goes with a gender transition?
This isn’t just about people who may be three to four years into their transition, but it is about people who may be just at the beginning of the process of going out into the world in the form of their gender identity and may not have reached the point of filing for paperwork to change their name and/or gender yet.
It could be about a high school kid who dresses up for the first time in an effort to discover or confirm their gender identity.
I have never had to deal with this type of a difficult situation, I assume most on here haven’t either. (Too bad you don’t have any transgender contributors here). Maybe a person who has felt they were different from early on asked their representative to provide them with a formal way to change their identity history to reflect how they feel. This might give them “closure” for a process they go through, since they always felt a certain way this bill would allow them to change their identity from their beginning.
Who knows if they were looking at a “papers at the door” regulation.
gay men and lesbians on this site who grew up in Roman Catholic and/or extreme protestant households that the idea that we would go to our families or in your words, our representatives, before we were absolutely positive of our identity for fear of retribution from our own families is just absurd.
Further, it is my understanding that even in a clinical arena, someone going through a gender transition needs to live full time in that gender identity for at least a year, prior to getting a psychiatrist to sign off on the necessary paperwork before the gender reassignment steps can proceed.
This is not at all like registering as a Democrat, then filling out a simple form like a voter registration card, to change your party affiliation. It is way more complicated than voter registration.
Simply consider the number of closeted gay men and lesbians who quietly moved to San Francisco or New York City (or in my case, Boston) so that they could live their lives openly and without fear or judgement.
Why would you assert that?
Are there? It’s an extremely personal and difficult situation, any comments from a personal perspective would be very interesting. Someone like Caitlyn Jenner gets interviewed and the courage she showed adds perspective and honesty.
This type of forum provides the opportunity to ask respectful questions and get insightful answers from a person you may never have the opportunity to run into. So are there any personal insights?
But even Caitlyn does not speak for every other person in that situation. I have read there are other LGBT people who were very critical of her. Insert Senator for representative and you’ll know what I meant.
Some may want the opportunity to change their birth certificate for their own reasons.
Just a guess but there is not a lot of diversity on here. Have you ever done a voluntary, anonymus census on here? Just curious.
… and ‘they’ are not marked with badge, blemish or brand nor do they have stigmata or even letters (scarlet or otherwise) to note their existance. Or, put another way, you have had to opportunity to run into them. Why do you think you have not?
hope I treated them the same as I try to treat everyone I meet. I do have some gay friends and relatives, some of whom are so comfortable in their situation and with me they have specifically told me to ask any question I ever had any curiosity about, no limits. I think the anonimity of this sight could give people the opportunity to ask questions of a transgender person that they might not otherwise get. It might take years to build the trust necessary for that to happen.
… You may have, however, at least as concerns this blog, you assumed that you had not.
This entire issue of public accommodations rests upon exactly the (frankly) white hetero-normative perspective that, alone, can derive such assumptions about identity, identification, gender and motive.
Agnieszka Holland directed a movie called ‘Europa Europa’ in 1990 It was about a German Jewish boy who, through a running gag of both tragedy and farce, was separated from his family, captured by the Soviets and then ‘rescued’ from the Soviets by the Germans who assumed he was Aryan (his papers having been lost) and send him off to training as a Hitler Youth. In a brilliantly understated scene one of the teachers at this school for Nazi Youth stands him up before all the others and points out his pure Aryan-ness… all this in a lecture about how to recognize Jews!
This is relevant only insofar as the transgender person is the problem. But they are not the problem. Your assumptions are the problem. They just want to go to the bathroom. It is other people who are putting obstacles in their path based upon assumptions you make and you share. If you want to know about the biology, psychology and perspective about the fact and reality of transgender that’s one thing… and go ahead and ask. But it is entirely irrelevant here.
I used to get a chuckle out of this line of reasoning when it was trotted out during the entirety of the debate about whether gays should be allowed in the military. I’ve heard tell that closeted gays in the military also used to get quite a chuckle out of hearing some bigoted fellow soldier say they’d never trust their lives to the hands of a gay soldier. Well, they already had!
All of this is to say that the obstacles to trust, and thus the things that need to be eradicated to build that trust, are entirely on the one side and pointedly absent with the other…
…especially if I’m wrong which would be mortifying, but I can think of one occasional BMGer who I think is.
.
There are people who contribute on here and for some instances (at least for me) their opinions carry more weight than others. If someone were transgender and they gave an opinion on the bill I think they might have more insight than I would.
If there are questions about computer security Somerville Tom knows more than me, insider politics The Best Defense, anything about a thesaurus Petr.
It seems to me that an easier solution is to provide restrooms with stalls that actually close and that actually provide a measure of privacy to the occupant. Creepy people who abuse these freedoms can be prosecuted under existing laws.
I don’t want the government deciding whose gender identity and/or preference is “real”.
I think we’ve agonized too much about the transgender bill already. I think we should pass it, the governor should sign it, and we should all move on.
Not sure how you prosecute “creepy people” though. Can’t anyone claim they are transgender if challenged?
But that’s no different from status quo. Thus, this is a solution in search of a problem. The Senator’s proposal seems less designed to be a solution to anything than a means of puncturing fearmongering opposition. For that reason, I applaud it.
I honestly don’t know.
Everyone acts like saying “I identify as female” is some sort of absolute defense to everything, like the FL “stand your ground” law or something. If you are stalking or peeping tomming or committing assualt, you are, regardless of your identity or location. That doesn’t change at all. Even right now, being in the wrong public bathroom is not sufficient to prosecute someone, unless they were there doing something that is elsewhere designated a crime. All the damn bill says is that this, alone, is not a sufficient reason to throw someone out of your restaurant.
So there doesn’t have to be any test at all.
bathroom or locker room that they want to use? Is that correct?
In many cases the facilities there include a unisex vanity and sink room with stalls on the sides with full doors as you describe.
handle it in offices in Holland. It’s not what we think of as stalls- walls and door are floor to ceiling to that you’re completely enclosed. Bathroom is then unisex. Note they also have similar “stalls” in segregated bathrooms as well.
A small fee for the amendment, I assume.
So it’s okay, you know.
to notice how well-written this little diary is.