Life would be so much easier if organisations that needed to know your sex (if any!) took their own responsibility for recording it, and no-one else did.
When I used to run training sessions in Diversity & Equality, I used to point out that at my advanced age, I could remember times when misogyny, racism, homophobia and more were commonplace and accepted by many as the norm. Now, to a large number of people, such views are abhorrent, and people are appalled that anyone could legally deny services, for example, based on such discrimination. A significant step in combatting the discrimination was to stop recording unnecessary information, such as marital status, sex, race, sexual orientation or date of birth when it isn’t necessary. This applied to all sorts of things, such as mortgage applications and hire purchase agreements, as well as the obvious job applications. There were times when the marital status of the parents or race were recorded on birth certificates, but not so recently in the UK. Recording race under apartheid regimes was hugely important in enabling discrimination.
To give a real sense of how things were, I used to try and think of something from the present that we all accept, but that will seem strange in the future. Of course this is a difficult, if not impossible, task. We all live in the time, and are part of the social norms that prevail. I wondered whether things like relationships with other primates might fall into the category, but decided that was too provocative, and I think deeply unlikely.
However, I now see something that I think will change, because we haven’t carried things through to their logical conclusion. We still record the sex at birth.
The government should decide that it has no interest in your sex for the vast majority of its work.
Gender recognition certificates? – No need, or even meaning?
Same sex marriage? How would they know; so they don’t care. If the government wants to get involved in relationships, marriage (or equivalent) is simply a contract that has a standard set of clauses that has been given a stamp of approval by the lawmakers. We have sort of got there, but in a complicated way. No record of sex would make it all much simpler.
I can’t actually think of a field where government might have a sensible reason to know. For health planning, of maternity and other specialist facilities maybe, but that would be part of a more comprehensive survey of the different categories of people that have certain requirements. In any case, if there is a statistic that we can infer with accuracy, it is that about 51% of births will be male, and planning doesn’t need to know about individuals, just populations..
Oh yes, toilets. And prisons. They really should not be an issue, but unfortunately they are. Everyone should have an expectation of being treated respectfully wherever they are. I like clean and safe toilets. Were I to go to prison, I should be able to spend my time there without imminent fear of rape and abuse.
But I can’t. And nor can many people, most noticeably women, reportedly.
I see the problem here is that we fail to treat and protect people properly. If you start from a position that sex is a significant characteristic, then you end up in weird places. So don’t start there.
Religions and sports and other service providers may decide they want to know about an individual’s sex and/or gender. That is fine, within the constraints of any local discrimination laws. But there is no reason for the government to be involved. Such organisations can take whatever (legal) steps they like to define the categories they want, using whatever criteria is suitable for their purposes. And of course there is no reason why any two organisations would need to agree on criteria.
OK. And so I know that this wouldn’t immediately solve all the issues we may have around sex and gender. But it is a significant shift that would put things on a firmer footing. After all, why did the people in control start recording sex? It certainly made it easier for the men who controlled the world to discriminate against and even subjugate women? So then they only needed to focus on identifying the “wrong” people in the other half of the population. You need the law to identify groups before you can pass laws controlling and disempowering them.
We should now recognise that the time of sex discrimination is coming to an end, we hope. And so discarding the mechanisms and superstructure that enables it is an important step. In apartheid South Africa, it was the dombook (pass book) and racial classifications that had to go as a step towards equality.
mean on a clothes tag?