A striking comment in the New York Times by trans activist Susan Stryker!
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/10/19/is-checking-the-sex-box-necessary/undoing-sex-classification-can-provide-justice?
Undoing Sex Classification Can Provide Justice
Should the government legally distinguish between sexes? I think not. This is not to deny that bodies have different biological capacities, or to assert that all bodies are alike, but rather to point out that sex classification undergirds unequal access to employment, marriage, parental rights, inheritance and many social services — to name a few of the consequences of creating two distinct legal categories of personhood.
The male-female distinctions undergird unequal access to employment, marriage, parental rights and inheritance, creating two distinct legal categories of personhood.
As the work of the political scientist Paisley Currah documents, sex is not, in fact, clearly defined in the United States. Rather, there exists only a hodgepodge of fuzzy, contradictory, assumption-riddled habits, practices, procedures, rules, ordinances, statutes, rulings and judgments in various, often overlapping, jurisdictions (as the difference between birth certificate amendment practices in New York City and New York State demonstrate).
We assume sex to be naturally given and apparent, but when pushed to define it, we fall down the rabbit hole and can’t say definitively what biological sex actually is, or exactly how it relates to the social categories we call “women” and “men.” Is sex in the gonads, the chromosomes or the brain? Can it be defined by socialization, or by the assertion of a profoundly felt identity? Is it immutable, or can it be changed by a scalpel or stroke of a pen?
What if “sex” is just a shorthand for the most familiar configuration of these elements, a concept we are compelled to define only when confronted by anomalous cases such as those presented by transgender and intersex people?
Undoing sex classifications might seem utopian — it would mean, for example, abolishing the sex-segregated way prisons and the military are currently organized, just as we are now abolishing sex-segregated rights to marriage — but that doesn’t mean justice wouldn’t be served by heading in that direction.
We assume sex to be naturally given and apparent, but when pushed to define it, we fall down the rabbit hole and can’t say definitively what biological sex actually is, or exactly how it relates to the social categories we call “women” and “men.” Is sex in the gonads, the chromosomes or the brain? Can it be defined by socialization, or by the assertion of a profoundly felt identity? Is it immutable, or can it be changed by a scalpel or stroke of a pen?
What if “sex” is just a shorthand for the most familiar configuration of these elements, a concept we are compelled to define only when confronted by anomalous cases such as those presented by transgender and intersex people?
Undoing sex classifications might seem utopian — it would mean, for example, abolishing the sex-segregated way prisons and the military are currently organized, just as we are now abolishing sex-segregated rights to marriage — but that doesn’t mean justice wouldn’t be served by heading in that direction.
http://gws.arizona.edu/user/161
https://www.dukeupress.edu/TSQ-Transgender-Studies-Quarterly/
===
===
No comments:
Post a Comment