we should be working towards a position where the law is sex and gender blind, and people are not required to be registered as male or female at birth for legal purposes.
The recording of sex is neither a violation of human rights not an intrusion into people's privacy. Alongside our date and place of birth, it is one of the most basic, and immutable, facts about a person.
The demand to cease recording sex and to remove all protections on the basis of sex from laws, policies and regulations comes from Principle 31 of the Yogyakarta Principles plus Ten.
This is not a human rights instrument like the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, which unequivocally states that women are discriminated against because of their sex. It isn't like the European Convention on Human Rights, which carefully seeks to ensure that the basic human rights of all people are protected.
No, it's an advocacy document never debated and scrutinised either at the UN or the Council of Europe or the EU, or even our UK parliaments. We know from a number of its authors that the impact of implementing its demands on women, especially Principle 31, was never once considered. It is neither interested in upholding the rights of all people, nor in remedying, or even acknowledging discrimination suffered by any other groups, especially women.
The oppression of women and girls is one of the if not the oldest forms of oppression on the planet. It has been going on for thousands of years and there is no country on this planet that has succeeded in abolishing it in practice.
The only remedy we have to oppression on the basis of sex are laws that protect us on the basis of sex and policies and regulations that take sex into account.
The demand to cease recording sex, remove all protections on the basis of sex and enshrine gender identity in law is therefore an explicitly and profoundly anti-women commitment against women's equality and liberation from oppression.
Sex and gender blind policy making is a failure to recognise the needs of women and girls on the basis of their sex, which even in an egalitarian utopia will have to be met. Such policymaking is a tool to ensure the continued inequality of women and girls.
So no, we shouldn't work towards a position where the law is sex and gender blind, because that would benefit men at the expense of women. That's not a defensible or justifiable demand if you want all people to have equal rights and you want all people to have their needs met.
Above all, this is not a demand rooted in the doctrine of human rights, whose principles extend empathy to all and afford all people equal protection according to their needs, which includes the freedoms of thought, conscience, speech, expression, belief, religion and association but the doctrine of gender identity, which seeks to impose a singular quasi-religious ideology on all of us and whose adherents seek to punish opponents, ostracise apostates and pursue laws, policies and regulations that violate all of the listed freedoms.
That's not a benign, or even neutral position to take. It is a stance opposed to fundamental human rights principles and practice.
There is no argument about that that still needs to be had. The evidence is in, we're living it all over this planet. Sex and gender blind laws is where we've been. A return to that is to remove all protections for women and girls.