Martine Rothblatt: A Founding Father of the Transgender Empire

[stumbledin]

The Transexual and Transgender Health Law Reports initiated by Frye and Rothblatt and then Whittle, became a working draft for another global document and committee outlining transsexual/transgender rights in the UK, the Interdepartmental Working Group on Transexual People, advanced by yet another male, transsexual, lawyer, Christine Burns and set up by the Home Secretary of the UK in 1999. Membership at the Working group included representatives from Scotland, Ireland, Wales and the US.

These four lawyers, all transsexual identifying, have been the main generators of a project to deconstruct sex within the law, on a global scale and to have it replaced with medical identities representing how people feel about their bodies. Martine Rothblatt has gone much further in this deconstruction process.

Article by Jennifer Bilek
uncommongroundmedia.com/martine-rothblatt-a-founding-father-of-the-transgender-empire/

I skim-read this but this instantly raised red-flags for me: a lawyer who studied for a Phd in medical ethics who also "worked for NASA, was the CEO of GeoStar and the co-creator of SiriusXM Satellite Radio".

That is an extremely - extremely - random CV. Something about it doesn't ring right.

I think that's the point of the article. Someone who has a very personal agenda has got influence and supposed qualifications to set the agenda.

And however worrying that is, equally worrying that so many accept them having the status and qualifications to be this influencial.

(The bit about making a robot copy of his wife it just gross.)

@QuarantineDream

I skim-read this but this instantly raised red-flags for me: a lawyer who studied for a Phd in medical ethics who also "worked for NASA, was the CEO of GeoStar and the co-creator of SiriusXM Satellite Radio".

That is an extremely - extremely - random CV. Something about it doesn't ring right.

It is possibly a case of creative CV writing.

Look at Martine's wiki page
look at the photo of Martine with the three male engineers ...
body language is amazing stuff

That's very much what I'm thinking @TehBewilderness. And it's male privilege that means none of those claims to academic or other qualifications are ever questioned.

I find it so strange that Wikipedia uses the pronoun "she" even for that period of Rothblatt's life prior to announcing themselves transgender. It's like rewriting history.
It's so weird to think that if it were discovered that Hitler in his final days of life had written that he now considered himself a woman, all the history of Europe would have to be rewritten to call him "she" throughout his life.

The CV stacks up
but yes odd that Martin's degree is implied to have been awarded to a woman.
Sadly I doubt that a young woman would have had those opportunities in the late 70's and early 80's

These four lawyers, all transsexual identifying, have been the main generators of a project to deconstruct sex within the law, on a global scale and to have it replaced with medical identities representing how people feel about their bodies.

This was the aim of the GRA. Stephen Whittle describes this in a paper written in 2007.
e-space.mmu.ac.uk/621107/1/2007-Whittle%20Turner%20-Sex%20Changes%20-Paradigm%20Shifts%20in%20Sex%20%26%20Gender.pdf

As the Gender Recognition Act states that one’s acquired gender becomes one’s legal sex then there is little difference between sex and gender. Indeed sex is preceded and exceeded by gender by the terms of the Gender Recognition Act. Sex in this sense is determined by gender identity – the social role that one chooses to take. This reverses the original gender attribution at birth which as based on the genitals (and strictly speaking not based on other ‘known’ identifiers of biological sex such as chromosomes). For the Gender Recognition Act, the body is irrelevant, as neither bodily modification, nor the presence or lack of a penis is determinative. Moreover, the Gender Recognition Act is performative (see Butler 1990), in that as a form of speech-act, what it ‘does’ is makes gender into sex in law. Indeed, as one of the authors was present at the meeting in the Department of Constitutional Affairs where the question of ‘gender’ or ‘sex’was discussed, it can be verified that the decision to use gender was to bring a contemporary recognition of the complexities of the question to the Act. The decision to include ‘sex’ as well as gender within the GRA was to acknowledge this and to ensure that the Act could not be challenged.

Changing sex for the purposes of legal recognition then, is not about changing biology or changing bodies to ‘match’ genders, but about changing how sex is legally defined. In that sense ‘having a sex change’ has a different meaning with new political consequences and challenges.