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There's been a bunch of discussion about Prop 8 (to ban gay marriage) in California on my flist recently. Now, not being californian or even american it's not something I have much specific to say on but it got me thinking.
First, some links:
Ithiliana thinks a federal push to recognise all sorts of relationships is better than a state-by-state push for just marraige and from the comments:
beyondmarriage.org, who are arguing for a wider speration of church and state, and protection/recognition for everyone (not just monogamous couples)
I've seen a couple of people make vague grumblings about the fact that black voters seemed to be more against the bill, today I came across a few debunkings of that: first, that there simply aren't enough black californians to have made a difference either way, second that they actually didn't vote that differently to white people, and third that what little bias there might have been is less likely to be due to inherent homophobia and more to the fact that the "No" campaign made MUCH less of an outreach to the non-white and poor community than the "Yes" campaign. This post has a nice collection of the ideas and some links.
Finally, via![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
shineys_are_us, an argument that if nothing else, the fact that gender is impossible to quantify makes "heterosexuality" impossible to police.
I'm not so sure about this: it works as long as everyone has an "M" or "F" label on their government records. Intersex and trans* people have been around for a pretty long while, and the law had no trouble being heterosexist despite them. But I do think that, somewhat separate to the gay rights issue, awareness of non-cisgendered people is growing and the government (our and theirs) is going to have to do something about it.
From what I've seen the australian bureaucracy really has no decent way of dealing with people outside the neat M/F box, at least not at a global level (individual groups may have room on their forms for it here and there, though afaict none of the big ones like the electoral roll do) Unfortunately fixing this is going to require more than just a lack of prejudice(*) and think the main issue is bureaucratic inertia and logistics.
So, as I ponder the logistics, my questions:
What alternative classifications could we use? None? M/F/Trans/Intersex? M/F/Other? Do other countries have any clever ways around the problem?
And apart from marriage, what other laws specifically mention the gender of the person they're talking about? Could they be easily changed to either not mention gender or make space for people whose gender is ambiguous or complicated? (pregnant men, for example) I think the references that are hardest to remove are those which are based on real biological differences ie things to do with pregnancy, but maybe you could just change that to "a person who is pregnant" or "A person with a womb" (for say rubella shots). There's also laws against gender discrimination, and this sort of thing is where you get a lot of friction between the "Fight for women's rights!" and "Remove the gender dichotomy" goals (both entirely worthy) I mean you can still say it's illegal to discriminate based on gender (as a perceived social construct rather than legal pigeonhole) but there are things like "Women's rooms" etc. I know some of you are against that sort of thing anyway, but for those who aren't, can you think of a way of protecting them without rigidly enforcing gender in the law?
(*)Unlike gay marriage, I don't know that ordinary people would actually be that offended if you added an "other" or whatever category to government forms. And the couple of times we've encountered what seem to be transpeople in the records at work the reaction is "Hmm, I think this person is trans, but unfortunately there's no way to tell if it's just a typo etc", I think if the people who made the records started adding it as a field we'd adjust ok (though it might take a while to fully integrate it into the system). I don't know what the opinions (or practicalities) are at a lower level (in hospitals etc)
I could be being naive about the level of opposition there would be to this sort of measure though.
First, some links:
Ithiliana thinks a federal push to recognise all sorts of relationships is better than a state-by-state push for just marraige and from the comments:
beyondmarriage.org, who are arguing for a wider speration of church and state, and protection/recognition for everyone (not just monogamous couples)
I've seen a couple of people make vague grumblings about the fact that black voters seemed to be more against the bill, today I came across a few debunkings of that: first, that there simply aren't enough black californians to have made a difference either way, second that they actually didn't vote that differently to white people, and third that what little bias there might have been is less likely to be due to inherent homophobia and more to the fact that the "No" campaign made MUCH less of an outreach to the non-white and poor community than the "Yes" campaign. This post has a nice collection of the ideas and some links.
Finally, via
shineys_are_us, an argument that if nothing else, the fact that gender is impossible to quantify makes "heterosexuality" impossible to police.I'm not so sure about this: it works as long as everyone has an "M" or "F" label on their government records. Intersex and trans* people have been around for a pretty long while, and the law had no trouble being heterosexist despite them. But I do think that, somewhat separate to the gay rights issue, awareness of non-cisgendered people is growing and the government (our and theirs) is going to have to do something about it.
From what I've seen the australian bureaucracy really has no decent way of dealing with people outside the neat M/F box, at least not at a global level (individual groups may have room on their forms for it here and there, though afaict none of the big ones like the electoral roll do) Unfortunately fixing this is going to require more than just a lack of prejudice(*) and think the main issue is bureaucratic inertia and logistics.
So, as I ponder the logistics, my questions:
What alternative classifications could we use? None? M/F/Trans/Intersex? M/F/Other? Do other countries have any clever ways around the problem?
And apart from marriage, what other laws specifically mention the gender of the person they're talking about? Could they be easily changed to either not mention gender or make space for people whose gender is ambiguous or complicated? (pregnant men, for example) I think the references that are hardest to remove are those which are based on real biological differences ie things to do with pregnancy, but maybe you could just change that to "a person who is pregnant" or "A person with a womb" (for say rubella shots). There's also laws against gender discrimination, and this sort of thing is where you get a lot of friction between the "Fight for women's rights!" and "Remove the gender dichotomy" goals (both entirely worthy) I mean you can still say it's illegal to discriminate based on gender (as a perceived social construct rather than legal pigeonhole) but there are things like "Women's rooms" etc. I know some of you are against that sort of thing anyway, but for those who aren't, can you think of a way of protecting them without rigidly enforcing gender in the law?
(*)Unlike gay marriage, I don't know that ordinary people would actually be that offended if you added an "other" or whatever category to government forms. And the couple of times we've encountered what seem to be transpeople in the records at work the reaction is "Hmm, I think this person is trans, but unfortunately there's no way to tell if it's just a typo etc", I think if the people who made the records started adding it as a field we'd adjust ok (though it might take a while to fully integrate it into the system). I don't know what the opinions (or practicalities) are at a lower level (in hospitals etc)
I could be being naive about the level of opposition there would be to this sort of measure though.
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