 Sometimes, it can be hard to tell one gender from another among the nations. But there are big differences to consider.
By: Editorial Board of The Jewish Press
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Last week, the New York City Board of Health withdrew a proposal it was about to adopt that would have allowed people to amend the information on their birth certificates as to their recorded gender if they could produce medical documentation that the designation was inconsistent with the way they live their lives. Thus, for example, under the proposed rule a person listed as “male” could get the designation changed to “female” if several doctors and health professionals certified that he self-identified as a woman and was in fact living his life as a woman.
As we noted several weeks ago, this proposal represented the “anything goes” mentality at its most absurd. Given that the proposal was the brainchild of a movement dedicated to eliminating anatomical considerations when defining gender, it was somewhat surprising that it got as far as it did. In fact, it was only after the issue received a jolt of publicity and ordinary citizens (after first gasping in disbelief) started to react, that the geniuses at the board of health backed off.
The process is really a case study in just how far government has gone in abandoning traditional values in order to accommodate the whims of fringe groups and how agenda-driven officials are prepared, if not fought off from the outset, to impose their lunacy on a hapless public. According to a story in The New York Times, shortly after news of the proposal was reported, health officials began hearing from hospital patients nervous about how doctors would determine the assignation of beds adjacent to theirs. In addition, law enforcement officials were concerned about whether prisoners with altered birth certificates could be housed with female prisoners even if they still had male anatomies. New York City Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Frieden, a strong and outspoken advocate of addressing the concerns of “the transgender community,” sheepishly admitted, “This is something we hadn’t fully thought through, frankly. What the birth certificate shows does have implications beyond just what the birth certificate shows.” There’s hope for this guy yet. But there is more. He said it was “unfortunate” that the panel of experts the health department convened to consider the proposal included only doctors, mental health professionals and advocates who generally supported the plan. There was no one from institutions that may have been affected, like jails, schools or hospitals – or plain folk who would have raised obvious concerns. The Times reported that certain pointed negative comments appear to have particularly affected the outcome, like the one sent to the health department by e-mail that asked, “Are you guys losing all sense of moral values?” The larger question, of course, is whether the public will ever be liberated from unelected officials who act in complete defiance of traditional values and common sense. No one has commented on this article. |
