Sex Self ID on the Wrong Side of History
Submission on the Supplementary Order Paper 59 of the BDMRR Bill
Sex self ID as proposed in this law change, allowing individuals to legally ‘identify’ as the opposite sex, is an attack on science and humanity. It is a major challenge to the human rights of women and children, gays and lesbians, being rushed through parliament while most people are preoccupied with the pandemic and their future on the planet.
Sex as a biological characteristic of humans is biological and immutable. Gender is the social relation between men and women which is mutable and subject to change. Since the origin of the first form of class society, the patriarchy, gender has enabled the subordination of women by men in order to control their reproductive and productive capacity. In this context, gender today is code for the oppression of women, as part of the backlash against the victories won by women resisting their oppression, and sanctioned by the state legitimation of their submission.
The promotion of gender over sex in law for the purpose of legal identity, therefore, reduces women to an oppressed sex. Giving legal legitimacy to transgender identity over sex erases women’s history of subordination to men, and worse, becomes enlisted socially in the oppression of women today. Sex self ID, along with the other changes that validate it, allows men the legal status of women so that any attempt by women to criticize and resist this form of gender ‘inclusion’ will be outlawed as ‘hate speech’ or worse ‘gay conversion.
If Sex Self ID becomes law it will license men who identify as women to invade women’s spaces, deny them jobs, and get them imprisoned as ‘transphobes’ or even ‘homophobes’. Men who have always feared lesbians as a threat to their fragile manhood, are increasingly using Sex Self ID to demand sexual relations with them as a violent form of gay conversion. Lesbians who reject these sexual demands can, under a law that legally protects gender against sex, be sent to prison for ‘hate speech’. There they will find themselves locked up with transmen who have a record of sex crimes against women and children.
In sum, this law change serves to perpetuate the historic male dominance of women and girls, and as collateral, gays and lesbians, behind the façade of a progressive human rights narrative. If there was ever a change in the relations of the two sexes, driving the historic rights of women back into pre-history, that justifies using the cliché “on the wrong side of history”, this is it.
Today, where Self Sex ID has been legislated in other jurisdictions, transgender men no longer need to make any attempt to represent the stereotypical gender of women by making ‘sex changes’ to their bodies, or even to dress as women, I recommend that the supplementary Order Paper 59 of the BDMRR Bill relating to self sex identification, be withdrawn until a deep and honest ‘conversation’ is held among all sectors of society, most importantly women and children, gays and lesbians.
