Tasmanian plan for gender-neutral birth certificates is crazy

What’s wrong with Tasmania? The plan to degenderise birth certificates is identity politics gone mad.

What is it about Tasmania that the state with only slightly more people than the ACT is becoming a social laboratory for every crazy social experiment? This is the place where a “human rights” board challenged a Catholic archbishop’s right to exercise his freedom of religion by disseminating the Catholic doctrine on marriage.

Now, as if in some surreal reinterpretation of The Emperor’s New Clothes, the fairytale isle is set to degenderise birth certificates. Officially no one will be born male or female in Tasmania. It might come as a surprise to new mums and dads that their child’s sex will not be recorded on the certificate, even though it has to be recorded on one’s passport — for which one needs a birth certificate.

Don’t think the gender activists haven’t thought about that catch. Despite a lack of consensus on this issue in Australia, I have no doubt we will all soon be deprived of any true biological identification in any sphere of life. Our sexual identity will depend on how we “self-identify”. In Britain recently, there was a movement to allow trans people to identify as the opposite sex without any surgery or hormone treatment, which of course would eventually paid for by the National Health Service. The absurd consequences of self-identification should be obvious — but the gender commissars can’t see them.

The degenderising movement is one of the most puzzling results of identity politics, at least puzzling to the average person who regards their sex or gender, as even the transgender movement insists, as fundamental to identity. So we should be asking ourselves: How far can self-identification go? Can people switch back and forth? What are the legal, medical, social and emotional consequences of all this gender fluidity?

These questions are partly answered in Patrick Byrne’s new book, Transgender: One shade of Grey. Byrne points to the multitude of consequences that have not been thought through. For example, the indeterminate sex of athletes has already become a problem in sport, even at Olympic level, as it has in the use of facilities such as toilets. This might seem trivial, but we should be asking ourselves whether the law is moving into the wrong sphere. Should the law be regulating matters that are purely personal, based on feelings, emotions and preferences?

Byrne’s view is that law should stay out of these areas, but where it needs to intervene, and if a definition is rarely required, it should be derived not from emotion or preference but from strictly objective biological criteria.

However, on a social and emotional level perhaps the most compelling reason for thinking twice about bowing to the gender-neutral notion is the confusing consequences for children, especially boys. There is no doubting the statistics that point to a huge rise in the emotional and cognitive problems that beset boys. It is boys who suffer most from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. It is boys who overwhelmingly suffer Asperger’s, and it is in the main boys who account for the rise in diagnosis of autism. Psychologists also point to boys’ normal behaviour being pathologised. In education and beyond, boys lack male role models and suffer father absence. The potential for even more confusion in “gender neutral” times movement seems obvious.

The medical and legal consequences of gender reassignment in relation to children are already a huge area of controversy. Despite their immaturity, children, under Gillick competence — which is used to decide whether a child under 16 is able to consent to their medical treatment — are allowed agency to change their gender at a very young age, when they are not considered legally rationally competent for any other life choice. So how far, and into what other areas of life, will this go?

Another important question about degenderising us is one women and girls should be asking. What are the consequences for women’s rights? Male to female transgender people, who make up the majority of activists, have decided to identify with feminism, much to the ire of notable feminists including Julie Burchill and Germaine Greer. Those two have (shock horror) pointed to the truth: trans women are not women, they are transsexuals. Because they don’t have female chromosomes, nor the same biological and life experiences, they lack the mental and emotional foundation to be women.

Sometimes the feminist response to the transsexual dilemma, which is a terrible burden, can be too cruel. The feminist movement was only too happy to ally itself with the LGBTI lobby in the past, but now this has come back to bite them. If only the feminists hadn’t been such harsh, unceasing megaphones of complaint about the ordinary business of womanhood in our rich and privileged society, we might take more notice of their objections to the degenderising movement.

Burchill has been particularly vehement in her refusal to acknowledge transsexuals as victims, which they often were. She was bitterly criticised for her “privileged stance”.

Enraged, she replied: “The idea that a person can chose their gender — in a world where millions of people, especially ‘cis-gendered’ women, are not free to choose who they marry, what they eat or whether or not their genitals are cut off and sewn up with barbed wire when they are still babies — and have their major beautification operations paid for by the National Health Service seems the ultimate privilege, so don’t tell me to check mine.”

True, Julie. Strangely, though, many feminists weren’t talking much about those women before the ideological problem of transgenderism raised their ire, and I doubt we will hear the feminists’ voice insisting that Tasmania’s latest foray into gender neutrality is nothing more than foolishly naked identity politics.