Future of Legal Gender academic talk

Waterl00, oh, no tangible benefit beyond feelz of course. But yeah, instead of trying to free all people of the harmful effects of gender stereotypes, NB people instead remove themselves and label themselves as special and different to all the other girls/boys. How progressive.

It’s also amazing how neoliberal this all is. It’s all about the individual and the rational mind being detached from the body. Ironic because many of the people who peddle this stuff claim to be left-wing and go round calling each other ‘comrade’.

Ali86 ah yes, Afghanistan. That famous bastion of gender equality. It’s so so dumb. This is why it’s so convenient to be able to label any dissent as bigoted hatred.

Wow, the mental gymnastics you have to perform to think that’s a coherent argument. The only beneficiaries of this that I can see are the small number of people who see themselves as non-binary and even they are only able to do so due to the existence of a gender binary.

Don’t get me wrong, I would love to get rid of gender stereotypes and norms. But whatever it says in my passport, my body remains the same. There needs to be some sort of record of what sort of body I have because of the historical and current prejudice against it. This proposal doesn’t do anything about stereotypes (it wants us to ‘choose’ which stereotype we prefer....). It does want to get rid of an official record about my body. It’s especially concerning in the light of Caroline Criado-Perez’s research on the exclusion of female bodies in so many different areas. We need more attention to the body and what the body needs, not less. For that, we need some sort of record-keeping.

Yes, nettie, exactly. It won’t, will it? We haven’t had birth certificates and passports for that long but I am pretty sure that it wasn’t a haven of equality before that.
The idea that medical professionals assign you a gender is bullshit too. Some babies are born at home with no medical intervention so cannot be described as having anything assigned. Doesn’t make them any less susceptible to gender stereotypes.

Under Professor Cooper’s model, nothing is done to challenge stereotypes. Instead, we pretend that they are freely chosen and therefore great.

Exactly. Why don’t we stop recording statistics about race too? After all, we’re all part of the human race.
The state’s role in terms of birth certificates and passports is for statistical purposes. We’d know we were male or female without it, and long before official records started to be kept, people knew it. Therefore, the only possible effect it will have is to make it impossible to prove that certain groups are disadvantaged. The key is to tackle gender-norms and actually the work of first and second wave feminists who fought discrimination on the basis of SEX had massive massive positive effects. Maybe Cooper should show some gratitude for that work which has enabled her to be able to claim hundreds of thousands of public funds to indulge her own nonsensical musings. Had she been born 100 years ago, that wouldn’t have been possible.

Really sad that that three quarters of a million of public money could have gone towards essential work needed to protect women and girls from violence.

Like you say, what they are suggesting is nonsense. It makes no odds whether sex is on our birth certificates for the purpose of discrimination. It’s whether we are visibly male or visibly female that determines whether we are discriminated against. If there is an X in my passport it doesn’t mean people will start treating me differently. All it will do is mean that there is no official record of women being treated worse and no means to challenge through sex discrimination laws. Cannot see a single thing that will be improved by it except maybe Professor Cooper’s salary and career.