Identifying into a protected characteristic

[BewaretheIckabog]

I know I’m back to basics again but:

You cannot identify as another age - at -16 everybody believes they are an adult but if they pass as 18 they are breaking the law buying alcohol.

Transracial - Rachel Dolezal is dismissed as a fraud, a bit strange but not to be taken seriously.

You can’t identify as a disabled person and claim benefits. If you are not genuinely disabled you will be prosecuted.

You cannot change age or race but you can change sex?

I don't see why you can identify into one immutable characteristic (which you are not) and not another. Maybe they should be redefined as choices you make that are protected.

As a side note though, do you remember when 'transablism' was in the news?

Though you can technically modify your body enough to become disabled, like those with Body Integrity Identity Disorder sometimes manage to do.

But isn't this why TRAs conflate the terms sex and gender? Making it easier for people to accept that sex can be changed if you're using the word interchangeably with gender?

My teenage daughter had an appointment yesterday, and I was accompanying her. There was a lot of form filling to begin with. There we sat, with our palest of pale Irish skin clearly visible, and we were asked in all seriousness if we considered ourselves white. Now, obviously we do, but I'd love to know what would have happened if I'd said 'no, I'd like to be recorded as black'. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have been accepted.

The difference with the protected characteristic of sex is that gender has been thrown into the mix to muddy the waters.

So although most people don’t think you literally swap the DNA in every cell in your body to become the opposite sex, once you say someone who changes gender is now legally a female, it’s easy to slide into saying that person has also changed sex.

It’s like the fact that a man can tick the “Gender: female” box on the online passport application form and his passport will come back with “Sex: F” on it.

X-post @Tittie

But use of the term ‘gender’ to mean “what sex you’d like to be” is a recent invention. There hasn’t been a matching invention, or a vast well-funded lobby movement for claiming to be disabled or black.

I’m baffled. Not because some men wanted to do this, but because they’ve been backed by governments etc. I know they gained lots of goodwill by piggybacking on the gay rights movement. But even so.

In the 80s it was a plot device....