Transgender Sterilization Finally Dying

First I think there should be some clarity on sterilization. My understanding of the requirements (at least for various US states, which does not mean the US as a whole as it is a republic) is that to have gender reassigned you must undergo sex reassignment surgery which causes sterilization. This is separate from say different states forcing individuals of different classes or lower intelligence in getting sterilized, sometimes against their will. Also, in the comments of the Mother Jones article one person mentions that it was easier to have a federal agency (the Social Security Administration, which issues the Grail of identification in the US the SS card) recognize their gender change compared to other agencies.

Next, there isn’t a discussion of biological sex here in the article, which is what ID is actually going off of. I agree, ID should not include it since people have a hard time distinguishing between sex and gender. This thought process has led to inter-sexed individuals being assigned a sex at birth that they may not agree with gender-wise as they grow older as well as the very serious problems highlighted in the post.

When a bouncer at the bar or an officer who stops me for a speeding violation checks my ID, they’re never going to verify my genitals do in fact match up with what is listed. Also I’m fairly certain that I’ve never had my chromosomes checked just to verify. They’re looking mostly at the photograph, date of birth, height, and eye & hair color.

The thing about ID is that it’s listing biological sex (which might actually be helpful to first responders in an emergency or a medical examiner) and not gender. I firmly believe gender is a social construct; a means of distinguishing how one is different or similar from others. Is identification too closely associated with identity (as a social construct) that we imagine it contains no biological indicators? And what biological indicators should it include or not include? My ID lists my hair as brown but I was born blonde. When puberty started my hair started to shift from a dirty blonde to the shade of brown it is now.

Should we drop the sex listing on ID’s? Is sex listing useful on birth certificates for things like cultural geography? How can we create better awareness of sex vs. gender? Should ID’s allow for listing both sex and gender with gender being able to be changed without difficulty? Should ID’s list only gender instead? By changing the law in Sweden does it not ignore that maybe we’re picking the wrong information to used as identification?