Why don't we introduce legal gender?

At various points in the past few years I may have felt that finding a way to make everyone feel happy and 'validated' was the way to go.

BUT as it's not been reciprocal in any way and we've been told to shut up and women don't matter my answer is no.

You are either female or male.

Everything past that is personal preference. You decide to be a woman when you're actually a man then the problems that man encounters are of their own making and I'm no longer in the mood to help them larp their way through life.

Yes, as long as there is an option to indicate that you don’t have a gender, a bit like not having a religion.

I think this is a good compromise.

gender would have to be defined in law which it hasn't been so far. It's such a nebulous concept I think it would be hard to define

If this is about gender identity, here's my go: "Aspects of personality derived from stereotypes associated with masculinity or feminity or a combination thereof"

Yep. This sums it up perfectly I think.

(I appreciate your thought experiment OP. This is the kind of thing I'm always trying to do in my mind too. I think thought experiments can be useful for raising other people's critical thinking on a topic- so this would be good to put out there)

I respect your commitment to finding a compromise. The thing is though, we already have a compromise: The Gender Recognition Act plus single sex exceptions in the Equality Act. And look where that got us.

whilst it's not fundamentally a bad idea, I would strongly object if there was any "default assumption" that people who are of the female sex must have a female gender identity unless they declare otherwise, and likewise for males. So it would have to be blank for all babies, and clearly young children are too young to realise whether they are being indoctrinated with genderwoo magic thinking and would be likely railroaded into a particular declaration depending on their parents beliefs rather than their own, so I think it should stay blank until at least the age of 16, at which point one can either leave it as default blank or make a declaration. but the sex marker of M or F goes unchanged because that's a solid fact. and given that it's a separate field from sex, the gender declaration should have at least a dozen options (like how there are hundreds of ethnicities but equalities monitoring forms will gave clusters of a dozen or so that between them cover most people in appropriately broad clusters).

and when services or opportunities that might be appropriate to be segregated fir valid reasons are offered, then it can be made clear whether the justification for the segregation is based on gender (these gender categories have specific needs that it is appropriate to meet separately) or based on sex (this sex category has specific needs that it is appropriate to meet separately)

And why the discrimination of trans age people? Surely if a person feels they are 'forever 6 years old' they should get a yearly new certificate to show that with a date change and that's how they should then be treated and given access to services they want?......

@hryllilegur spot on. I've come to the same conclusion: it's not "I feel" it's "I want you to pretend". When you realise that's the crux of it, the whole thing is even more bonkers.

We are in our current mess because idiots at the European Court of human rights fell for the lie that all "trans" people are so convincing in their opposite-sex performance that the rest of us can't tell what they really are.

The court then saw fit to enshrine in law idiotic concept that people who want others to believe they are the opposite sex have the right to keep their sex private, and demanded that we set up a process by which such people could falsify their documents in order to hide their sex.

The whopping great (and very obvious) flaw being that WE CAN TELL.

You have little more chance of keeping your sex secret than you do your height.

And now we're in the utterly bonkers position of being on the brink of self-id, where potentially thousands of VERY obvious men will have legal status as women.

I always wonder how organisations (not that any are inclined to try) are supposed to implement single sex exceptions for obvious men whose legal paperwork says "female" 🤔

But the modern meaning is that you ‘feel like a woman’, whatever that may mean. I don’t feel like a woman, I am a woman despite not having a womb (thus making me exempt from certain vibrators…!)(hysterectomy due to womb cancer risk - a risk a male would never have!) but I wear trouser and likes maths.

The definition isn’t even really ‘I feel X’.

It’s I want you to act as if I am X. So recording gender is recording a set of instructions telling other people how you have decided they must think and act.

Why is ‘gender’ a reasonable basis for controlling other people?

So to deal with the gender bullshit you'd impose a "gender" box on all of us?
I think it's better treated as a niche belief. If you want to change your gender you can apply for a GRC and get a different marker on your passport (which I agree should still include bio sex, and you'd have to bear in mind that introducing some markers would lead to people demanding others since this is no longer just about "transsexual" people but also about kids and people who haven't grown up cosplaying). But the rest of us should not have to choose a gender , or no gender, because it doesn't bloody exist.

Giving them a box to tick for gender, isn’t what they want.

Agreed. It would be interesting to hear the arguments against it though.

The trouble is, the ridiculous GRA law was debated and passed on the basis of trans people wanting to live 'stealth' and that they would all do everything within their power to 'pass' as the opposite sex so they therefore needed a new birth certificate to 'hide' their true sex. The belief was that they would experience discrimination otherwise. We know now that trans means whatever the hell anyone wants it to mean and most trans people do very little to pass and don't even want to. However the genie isn't going back in the bottle any time soon. The GRA needs throwing out but I can't see how we can achieve that frankly.

But surely gender is a spectrum of where you sit at any particular time along a line of stereotypes? How could that possibly be recorded in a legal document? Sex is binary, observable, immutable

Gender actually means nothing. And if you can have any gender or even non. How would medical staff know how to address you?

If you can be ‘kitty-self’ as you gender are we suggesting medical reports should refer to the patient as this ‘patient advises they tried ibuprofen but kitty-self said it didn’t help’

and when you want to change it? To ‘frog self’? A birth certificate to be changed again? Sounds expensive and pointless.

There isn’t a misunderstanding of sex and gender. TRAs have purposely tried to muddy the water. Sex based rights has always been their biggest hurdle, so they tried to confuse it with gender in order to cover their importance. The Trans rights lobby, don’t want gender classified on its own. Because that still wouldn’t allow trans women to claim sex based rights. They know sex and gender are 2 different things. They just want to convince people it’s not so they can get what they want. Which is access to womens sex based rights. And once they have access, women’s rights essentially do not exist. That’s the aim.

Giving them a box to tick for gender, isn’t what they want.

There is no ‘female’ gender, female is sex.

Feminine / masculine which are already gender constructs separate from sex. I.e men can be feminine and vice versa.

I think that's what the OP wants to achieve by having two separately defined categories that both have a legal "status"

At the moment, so many problems seem to arise from people conflating the two or trying to pretend that biological sex doesn't exist because gender is all that matters.

Legally recognising both would mean that they couldn't be confused or conflated. But that's exactly why the TWAW lobby would reject the idea.

Funnily enough I was thinking about this yesterday.

I have always thought that falsifying birth certificates was a terrible idea and should never have been done.

Lack of visible sex marker on documents with a photo like passports wouldn't matter to me in the slightest.

But then how would people like IW prove that IW IS A REAL WOMAN LET THAT PENETRATE without having IW's passport as proof?

(I don't care, btw, but I do wonder whether half of the 'gender trumps all' people would be up in arms if there was no way to prove their false identity)

i get where you’re coming from as well, and it may help to define what the modern meaning of gender is. It would be especially useful in a healthcare setting.

However, how do you define gender? In its simplistic forms, girls like pink and plays with dolls and boys wear blue and plays with trains.

But the modern meaning is that you ‘feel like a woman’, whatever that may mean. I don’t feel like a woman, I am a woman despite not having a womb (thus making me exempt from certain vibrators…!)(hysterectomy due to womb cancer risk - a risk a male would never have!) but I wear trouser and likes maths.

So although I don’t disagree with you, op, in principle, defining gender could be difficult.

Can I change mine to then say I wasn't born in Auchtermuchty to a lawyer and a nurse but I feel it was on Cyrillion-7 to Lord Apexoon and the High Priestess Zeela?

I think the best thing to do would be to accept that there is biological sex and that is that. There is no such thing as gender identity, it’s a meaningless indulgence.

By all means dress how you wish (as long as you remain decent), grow or cut your hair, wear cat ears and meow, but human beings can’t change sex so let’s cease this pretence. People with dysphoria of any kind deserve sympathy and help but we can’t turn the world on its head to magic those feelings away.

Nice idea by why? Like hryllilegur said it serves no more purpose than your favourite food. ID documents are for legally recorded facts not some people's personality preferences. If more information was to be on them things like blood group would be rather more useful and important.

TRAs won't like it because the whole point of transition is to break boundaries.

My objection is state (and corporate) over-reach into our private lives. Your gender, your personality, your star sign, your opinions, your sexuality (as opposed to sexual orientation which his rightly protected in the EA) - these are personal matters.

We are in a cost of living crisis and enough taxpayer money has been wasted on gender dancing already. At some point the government need to step up and say 'identify how you want, nothing to do with us.' Government documents are for verifiable, objective and relevant data.

What would be the point?
It's meaningless. All it achieves is perhaps explaining how you want to be addressed, but you could do that by simply asking 'how do you want to be addressed?'
No one needs 'know' how I feel about myself and I am not really that interested in this in other people. You do you as people say.

I quite like this idea.

I would rather like to force a serious attempt to define "gender".

Then, if that were successful, we could move on to discussing which things should be separated by sex, and which, if any, by gender.