Can I change my caste?

[Tadpolesinponds]

I've just come across this interesting piece of legal advice on whether it's possible for someone in India to change their caste. There are apparently "caste certificates", and the authorities carry out stringent checks when issuing a certificate. They don't accept self-declaration. There is nothing you can do to change your caste. Being a member of a disadvantaged caste can give you access to government aid, for instance, and for this reason lying about your caste or falsifying a caste certificate can lead to dismissal and even prosecution. But apparently in the UK we can't manage to have a single document which accurately says what sex someone is.
Can I Change My Caste?

The Caste system is destructive and very damaging to women.

I don't understand your point.

The point is that govts can and do say "no" to people who want to identify into and out of oppressed classes. The UK govt is simply choosing not to say "no" to men pretending to women.

I suppose the point is that another government has made a decision that a made up thing like caste, cannot be changed, its immutable.

Sex, which is not a made up thing, is apparently mutable. According to the UK government

It may not be comparing like with exact like but I get the point.

The caste system is destructive and very damaging to women.

So is the trans agenda.

The OP is making a valid point.

Caste is as real as gender. Meaning it’s not real; it’s a set of made up rules based on outdated concepts and stereotypes. Sex, however, is real, it’s a biological fact. Caste and gender are made up nonsense concepts, sex is not. Can you not see the comparison?

I get that both the Caste system and trans agenda are damaging to women. But the OP seems to be criticising(?) the UK government for not acting more like Indian government's enforcement of the Caste system.

OP might be, and I would agree that sex should not be something that governments can just pick and choose and name for yourself.

I think its more just the example of how made up things are treated compared to real things.

Its an interesting point

We could add into the discussio, which I know has been mentioned countless times on this bit of the forum, why you cant self identify your ethnicity. Why is that socially inappropriate? (given that ethnicity is no one thing in any case)

The enforcement of the Caste system in India does not protect the rights of oppressed classes. It operates to stop people from identifying out of oppressed classes to become actual human beings with fundamental human rights.

I always find the best comparison to be age. Because it's very possible to 'feel' 20 years younger. In fact our feelings will be much more reliable given we will have actually experienced it. Its also much more scientifically justifiable given its possible to have a biological age less than your chronogical age. I've yet to have anyone explain why we can't self ID our age and we can our 'gender'.

The Indian government have apparently taken strong measures, involving actual detailed checks by officials and the provision of accurate caste certificates, to prevent people from pretending that they're a different caste in order to access help and funding provided for members of that caste (on the grounds that they are disadvantaged). Pretending that you're a different caste, or falsifying a caste certificate, can be a criminal offence.
It is hugely easier to identify a person's sex than their caste (yes, I get that we in the West don't believe in caste). But we are being told that it's impossible to keep men out of women's spaces etc. because there's no way of working out whether someone's male or female. We don't even have a universally agreed definition of male and female anymore. The UK government was urged to keep the sex marker on one document, just one, accurate so that it would be possible, where necessary, to know for certain what someone's sex is (without a physical examination, and even then some transactivists don't believe that sex is determined by what the body looks like). They refused. The UK government wants to bring in identity cards. In countries like France, identity cards include sex. Presumably when these are brought in here it will be possible to choose the sex on your card? Since that's what happens with all our current official documentation. Should we try to campaign for accurate sex on identity cards? Or do we accept that legal sex is a matter of personal choice and can be changed on all documents at any time and for any or no reason? And that men can "change sex" to access courses and funding provided for women in areas where women are underrepresented? Or at the very least a man can access these if he has changed his official documents and more or less passes as a woman? A man who doesn't "change sex" risks prosecution for fraud in those circumstances. And then at what stage will the government bow to transactivist demands and accept that a man may be a woman biologically (due to taking hormones, having a female brain etc), and not just legally a woman?
Or would it be better just to do and say nothing and hope that the situation gradually goes back to normal as attitudes become less extreme and the trans agenda falls out of favour?

I would love to identify as retirement age and claim my state pension. Why not?

Except that apparently some aid/benefits is available to people in certain disadvantaged castes.

It doesn't make up for them being beaten, raped, murdered and enslaved, with impunity by other, "higher" castes. You might as well say the Taliban have got it right with their enforcement of single sex spaces.

It's not done to protect women. It is enforced as subjugation of, mostly poor, women and children.

No it doesn’t and the OP is not arguing that it does. The point is about self identification.

Should have the same over here, in the UK.

The Caste system is about keeping people down, not self ID. It is a classic, sexist, patriarchal system that hurts women most.

No matter their achievements, they will never escape their less than human, or even animal, status.

What is it about the Caste system that you want us to have in the UK?

The Indian govt has measures to try to level up the people from the oppressed castes. It knows that abolishing castes on paper doesn't work, they continue to operate in practice, so it does the next best thing of trying to uplift the members of the oppressed castes. The certificate is to stop people from non-oppressed castes from identifying as a member of an oppressed caste to fraudulently claim levelling-up measures.

The parallels with white people identifying as Black and men identifying as women are clear.

As are lots of things, I don’t think the op invented the caste system.

Ummm. No caste is based on actual ethnic differences, proven by linguistic and genetic studies. It’s not comparable to gender which has zero biological basis:

https://genome.cshlp.org/content/11/6/994.full.pdf

Of course the OP didn't invent the Caste system. I've no idea why you'd type that.

No. It serves to keep lower Caste people low. No matter how high they get. Indeed lower Caste people are beaten, raped, enslaved and murdered without impunity for having notions above their station. It is dangerous for them challenge their subjugation.

Caste declaration in India is more akin to Apartheid and the One Drop Rule. It is nothing like Self ID. It rules people out of humanity.

The higher caste people would abuse the lower caste people whether the Indian govt issued the certificates or not. The higher caste people would be able to determine what caste someone is from without the certificate, in the same way that Northern Irish people use tells (e.g. Aitch versus Haitch to pronounce H, "what school did you go to?", what you call the city that straddles the Foyle estuary) to determine your sectarian allegiance. Indian tech workers in the USA figure this out about each other, to the detriment of the Dalits who thought leaving India would free them from all that crap.

The Indian govt uses the certificates to stop higher caste people from pretending to be lower caste when it suited them, because they cannot abolish caste by fiat.

The parallels with demands to remove sex markers from State ID and allow people to falsify sex markers are clear.

• Like with caste in India, sex cannot be abolished by fiat.
• Like with caste in India, the dominant sex will abuse the subordinate sex because the dominant sex can see who the members of the subordinate sex are.
• Like with caste in India, a responsible govt tries to level the playing field between oppressed and oppressor.
• Like with caste in India, the members of the dominant group will try to steal the levelling-up measures from the subordinate group.

The Indian govt saw that last point and nixed the Brahmins' ability to steal the levelling-up measures from the Dalits. But the British govt won't nix men's ability to steal women's levelling-up measures.

Indian people do these things on the basis of caste despite the efforts of the Indian govt, not because of them

Have a read of the relevant part of the Indian Constitution.

"Higher" Castes beat, exploit, rape, enslave and murder "Lower" Castes because they can. And they know the Caste system will back them up and protect them on the basis that they were born better than their victims.

Government and law enforcement use the Caste system to subjugate and abuse in India dispite their words otherwise.

I see no reason why any feminist in the UK would think that anything about Indian Caste declaration policy is beneficial to UK people, Indian people but most importantly women.