Florida education officials on Wednesday unanimously approved harsher penalties against state college employees who violate a new law barring them and students from using restrooms or changing facilities for a gender other than the one assigned at birth.
1.7% of the population is intersex, so where do they fit in?
Probably in a gas chamber, the way things are headed.
that seems obtuse as well. why not define as if you have a y male and if you don’t female. I am not endorsing this bill but their definition is horrible. I complain about “gender assigned at birth” phrase but boy it fits for this bill.
Because they aren’t interested in doing so, and know that there are no good ways to define these things.
What they want is the means to impose strict gender norms, and to persecute anyone who does not fit for any reason and in any way.
So, today they want workers who aren’t super gender conforming to provide their birth certificates to use the restroom. Then they’ll escalate until workers conform or get shoved out. After that, strict gender dress codes for all employees, then gender-specific roles… sometime down the line, a ban on married women working in state organisations, women unofficially barred from most workplaces & most roles, and ideally barred from being out of the house without a male relative as chaperone, blocked from having a bank account or owning property, and in due course… welp now they are property.
I have a friend with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. She’s a woman, has always been a woman, is married to a man, and has two adopted kids (AIS means she’s sterile). She has XY chromosomes.
Is someone going to walk up to her and say, “Sorry, ma’am, you’re male now”?
Her gender assigned at birth was female. She was raised as a girl, always identified as a girl, and had no idea anything was different until she started having health problems at puberty.
Most likely any attempt at specific, verifiable definitions would be insufficient for their fascistic purpose. A biologist, Forrest Valkai, covers well the complexity involved when defining the social construct of sexual differentiation in a measurable way in the video Sex and Sensibility. Hence, the laws reliance on “reproductive role” while simply assuming some unstated definition of “biological sex”.
It’s probably specifically because they wanted to punt the intersex issue to the court system. Talking about chromosomes is too specific and measurable. Talking about sex in terms of being associated with gametes makes it more subjective.
Fairly confident that fascists don’t want intersex people to exist at all. They won’t say that openly yet, but they clearly find them as bothersome as trans and nonbinary people.
Nor do they want cis people wandering around thinking they can neglect to adhere to strict conservative gender norms. Indeed, this is likely what all of their deep hatred toward trans people is really about - the means to rile themselves up enough to inflict strict gender norms on the whole population. Whether they are fantasising about a world which looks like a 1950s advertisement for a refrigerator, or several levels more regressive again, they’re not intending any sort of pleasant outcome for anyone whose body or behaviour or identity does not quite fit with the fascist fantasy.
They won’t succeed in getting that far, but they absolutely will continue to ramp up their attacks.
EDIT: this is the crux of the phrase “trans rights are human rights”. Trans, NB & intersex people are the canary in the coalmine.
Outside the bathrooms, peeing on the wall/floor… or something.
(if I were intersex, I’d go with malicious compliance)