Argentine gender identity law

[MooncupGoddess]

Generally speaking I am all in favour of holding out a comradely hand to trans people and find the radfem position on the subject rather lacking in compassion.

However - this story about a new law in Argentina which will anyone to change their official gender identity at will does make me feel a trifle uneasy.

www.equalrightstrust.org/newsstory240512/index.htm

I don't understand your position. If you believe there is such a thing as a gender identity then allowing everybody to self identify is the only logical solution.

How else can you know what their gender identity is?

I think Article 11 is the most interesting and progressive aspect in that people won't have to jump through arbitrary hoops or conform to "gender norms" decided by medical practitioners in order to access treatment. I am aware many trans people feel they are compelled to look and act in line with stereotypical "presentation" of gender which does not feel right for them. But, they know if they don't play by those rules, they will be denied treatment.

It would be interesting to know if there is any research on this, but I would imagine the proportion of trans people who do not have any medical or surgical treatment of any kind or do anything to alter their presentation would be pretty rare. Even those who do not see themselves as either male or female generally present in a way that was different to how they did before they chose to transition - which almost always results in some form of treatment - anything from electrolysis to mastectomy.

Is your uneasiness coming from a worry that men will go through all the legal steps to be designated as female for the sole purpose of having access to women's toilets or have better access to women in order to harm them? Theoretically that's possible, but in practice, men have plenty of opportunities for both without the hoopla and cost of changing legal status.

Well - one of the complaints of the radfems is that allowing people to legally transition between sexes means that pre-op MTF transsexuals potentially have access to women's prisons, or to safe spaces like refuges where traumatised women would feel threatened by the presence of someone with a male body.

I've always assumed that such cases were few and far between, and that even if MTFs didn't have sex reassignment surgery they would still be on hormone treatment that would reduce their testosterone levels and make them much less of a potential threat.

But this law means that men convicted of a crime could just declare themselves women and be sent to a women's prison, no? Or declare themselves women to take advantage of positive discrimination.

I do agree that ending the requirement to confirm to stereotypical gender norms to get treatment is very sensible.

MG, I think there are three possible positions here:

1. You believe in gender identity but believe these must involve gender roles (possibly this is a right wing position). You would then support the position in the UK where some expert or group of experts decides you could can change gender as long as you have done what they require of you in terms of gender role/appearance.

1. You believe the gender identity but don't agree with imposed gender roles. You would support the Argentina position.

1. You don't agree with either gender identity or gender roles (that would include radical feminists). While you would rather people didn't change gender, you don't think any human being should be subjected to an 'expert's' opinion on their gender role because you believe gender roles are negative. As a consequence, the Argentina position should be preferable to the UK position from a radical feminist perspective because it only promotes one aspect of gender rather than two.

Interesting idea. I think the logical conclusion of a law like that is to say that gender is irrelevant. If you can change your gender just by requesting it to be changed on official documents, does it mean anything, really?

Instinctively I would say that making people submit to the scrutiny of experts and medical procedures before they can officially change gender seems barbaric and cruel. But it is a fact that in our society gender is used as an identifying feature and has an influence on day to day life in terms of the access a person can gain to certain places (such as toilets, female-only gyms, prisons, rape crisis services, refuges etc). If a person officially changes their gender then they need to be allowed to access those places and so other measures have to be put in place to ensure that the law isn't exploited. What would those measures be?

Hi Kim - yes, that is clearly the case in the UK (on a previous thread someone posted a list of the steps and it sounded very complex and lengthy). My worry is not about the UK situation but about radically simplifying the process, as in Argentina, such that (from the link I posted) one just has to fill in a form.

I don't believe in gender roles and am agnostic about gender identity; but I have read many accounts by trans people saying that since earliest childhood they really hated their birth body and felt it didn't reflect who they were in gender terms. So, I am sympathetic to trans people who want to change their bodies to fit how they feel inside. And if they have been through a transition process of some sort then yes, it seems fair that they can transition legally to the opposite sex.

However - it seems really odd to me that people can change their legal sex identity without any sort of physical change. The idea of a man with a 100% functioning male body filling in a few tickboxes to change his legal identity to female feels quite problematic for the reasons Cailin and I mentioned above.

Kim the OP is about Argentina where according to a new law changing your gender identity is a walk in the park. That's the issue.

Wouldn't want to be a female 100 metres champion in Argentina then.

An equalist perspective which be best cos then would be bo deferention However as we have gender then we have gender idntity and roles. As I understand it the whole trans debate is based on patriachical asumptions and still keep women at the bottom of the pile