I understand the sentiment that the Trump administration is draconian, especially for people traveling from abroad considering the new border policy. But, pardon me, how is that executive order about sex a "threat"? Listed as the top issue undermines the credibility of this petition I think.
if a post-op trans woman is arrested, she's denied access to HRT and sent to a men's prison, where she will be given to violent male inmates to pacify them. this is known as v-coding. even having a vagina doesn't exempt you from men's prison, it just makes you more likely to be repeatedly raped as the justice system grinds on. this was already the case in some US states but the EO makes it Federal.
the State Department has also announced that it considers sex markers that don't correspond to sex at birth to be fraudulent. ostensibly for the sports ban, but it actually applies to all visa applications and documentation.
combine those two facts with the administration's stated antipathy towards us, and the recent trend of Germans and Canadians being detained for weeks with no apparent cause, and I think you should see why trans women ought to avoid US travel right now.
I have never understood the trans women in sports thing. I see why it could be unfair to allow them to compete but that is a thing I would like the sports associations to handle. Being born with a male body could be a big advantage in some sports but not in others. Why should our politicians micromanage sports rules? Especially to make them more restrictive. Let the sports associations handle this.
I hate this culture war micromanagment where politicians write moral laws for things where there should not be any law.
Check out all the issues currently faced by people with either updated or X gender on their documents. Look at what happens with documents at government level that use even vaguely trans-related words. Do you get why people would see erasure like that as threat, given historical context?
Just to add one more example, the anti-trans frenzy led someone to call the cops on a cisgender lesbian woman who was using the women's restroom, where the male cops barged in to arrest her:
The order being reasonable or not is not germane to the topic at hand. It isn't relevant what sex a transgender person is defined to be. What matters to the boycott is that transgender people in tech are facing difficulty entering the U.S. to attend the conference. Wouldn't you agree that's a problem?
Right. I think I was unclear -- my point is that whether or not you agree with the E.O., you must surely agree it makes travel to the U.S. difficult for transgender travellers, right? And that's a problem for the conference.
If you're wondering why transgender travellers don't have documentation that matches their birth sex, it's because (gender identity aside) it's usually more important for documentation to match one's appearance. Documentation that doesn't match one's appearance can lead to questions, delays, and confusions. I have no source for this.
If you're wondering why it's a problem for the conference, I don't have a source for that either. But from the tech conferences I've been to, I generally have observed a higher proportion of apparently transgender people than baseline. So by hosting in the U.S., the conference could potentially miss out on many transgender foreigners participating.
It’s usually more important for official documentation to be accurate, not for it to match appearance. Many people appear younger or older than they are, but it would be bizarre to put apparent age on a passport. The document is supposed to act as the ground truth. Passports don’t currently contain a gender marker, so maybe that could be campaigned for.
Apparent age vs actual age follows a very different probability distribution than apparent sex vs actual sex (whatever that is). We don't have 10-year-olds looking like 90-year-olds, and if one existed, they would encounter a lot of problems at the border. This is analogous to someone who appears male, even on close inspection, but has an F on their passport (or birth certificate, or driver's license). Plus, these are the sorts of things you use to get a drink at a bar, not just borders.
Other countries allow one's sex to be changed legally to solve this problem. It's not "inaccurate" -- it's semantics. According to a different definition of sex (for instance, hormonal sex, which can be changed medically; or apparent sex), one's sex on passport might correctly differ from one's birth sex.
You might object that that's a worse definition, and those countries should change to the U.S.'s definition. But due to intersex people, there is no universally consistent binary definition of sex. For instance, no country which does not permit sex to be changed legally allows for options outside of "F" and "M". So if you believe sex cannot be changed, then you must also admit that there are people who can never have accurate passports.
Those different “definitions” of sex are not the plain and common meaning of sex as reproductive role. “Hormonal sex” is a characteristic, not an alternative conceptual framework of what sex is.
Yes, passports should acknowledge intersex conditions and this would be far easier if there weren’t people with unambiguous sex trying to use that mechanism too.
"Sex" is a disguised query [1]. I would not agree with you that the plain and common meaning of sex is that it's the reproductive role (which for many trans people is "permanently sterile" anyway). If you run a clothing store, you don't care about reproductive role, you care about whether someone wears men's or women's fashion. In daily life, a stranger's sex is entirely their appearance: we make a snap judgment to classify it as M or F, and most people will agree for any given person whether they are M or F. It's quite easy to see why that's what matters: if you get a public safety alert on your phone about, say, an "asian male, middle-aged last seen at ..." do you think, in the rare cases where they differ, that this refers to reproductive role or appearance? Let's hope it's appearance!
In daily life, outside of dating perhaps, most people generally don't care about someone's reproductive role. In a public bathroom, most don't really care what's actually between someone's legs so long as the individual looks like they belong. The authorities almost always care about sex only as a visible characteristic for distinguishing people. When you say the common meaning refers to reproductive role, you are probably saying that only because it's a proxy for the aspects of one's sex we actually care about.
This recent obsession that when we talk about someone's sex we obviously mean in a reproductive capacity regardless of context is a totally political fabrication in my opinion, and there's no good reason for a passport agency to prefer that definition. I believe the information on a passport is meant to help identify an individual -- so common-sense sex, i.e. appearance, is most important. (Similarly, requiring trans people to use the public bathroom they don't visually look like they belong in is only going to cause chaos, if they obey such a law.)
I mention reproductive role (gametes etc.) because that’s what sex is, not because it’s the sole feature of interest. Why we care about someone’s sex is a different matter. Sometimes we don’t! You can sell someone a coffee, and their sex has little bearing on the situation. But sometimes we do care about their sex, because their sex has material consequences. Perhaps sports are the most relevant example to this discussion about passports. The IOC uses “passport gender” to assess eligibility, which is possibly why the current administration is insisting that passports reflect sex, not gender, because sex is what matters to sporting competition. Gender is far less relevant.
There are many other situations where sex and its material consequences matter more than gender. Yes, it’s not gametes that make a man run faster, but there’s a clear causal chain between gametes, sexual differentiation pathways, gonads, and testosterone.
Incidentally, it’s a really weird idea that we can’t tell someone’s sex without looking in their pants, or without some advanced scientific analysis. In reality, outward appearance is extremely highly correlated with sex, and humans (and a lot of animals!) have evolved to be experts at detecting sex, sometimes at a great distance. Visual appearance, gait, voice, behavior, and more, are enough clues to not just make a guess at sex, but to do so with very high accuracy. Probably upwards of 99%. Official documentation is there to clarify the 1%.
Well, the justification for the visa ban is sports, so I could agree that your definition of sex is what matters in this case. But I think in the majority of cases, sex is listed on the passport just to help with identification. If not, then why is it on the passport at all?
There are many definitions of sex. Some would say that sex should be defined chromosomally. I think it would be very unhelpful to put an M on a passport for an XY cis woman -- it should be an F, or maybe an X, if X were just a marker to indicate an unusual edge case. If so, shouldn't transgender people at least be afforded an X on their passport?
And then there's what's between your legs. Well, this is surgically alterable to some extent, so do you mean what's currently between your legs, what appears to be your legs, what was between your legs at birth, etc.? Or do you mean reproductive function? Maybe someone might say that a regular surgery isn't sufficient to change sex, but stem-cell-grown genitals do count as changing sex.
Regarding outward appearance (etc.) being correlated with "sex" (however it's been defined) -- that's exactly my point! In fact, because outward appearance is what is important nearly always -- except possibly in dating, reproduction, and sports -- and because there are a plethora of different meanings when sex is defined as "biological truth," I honestly think that outward appearance (etc.) is what most people actually mean when they say someone is a "man" or a "woman." Therefore, sex, in common usage, is appearance (etc.). This matches with how a tomato is a vegetable culinarily (i.e. colloquially), but a fruit botanically (i.e. "biological truth").
(Anyway, all this is really beside the point of this thread. You can disagree with everything I've said -- I'm just trying to argue that the U.S. is presently a difficult destination for transgender travellers.)
But if a transgender traveller applied for a visa with their birth sex instead of the sex on their documentation, this would very likely cause them to be flagged at the border, and they'd have a very difficult time entering the country (and reaching the conference). Surely you must agree?
Well, reality is more complex then this.
It misses intersex as a biological option.
Not common, but still, it is not in there, but reality for some humans.
"compensatory actions", is that how you refer to Trump's executive order regarding gender identity? As if it was "provoked" by something? Do you know there is a word for someone who is "provoked" by others gaining access to basic human rights?
Who was denied a visa for being trans? Citation needed. Were they denied because they were trans, or were they denied for another reason but happened to be trans.
The current advice from the German government to me (a trans woman) is that I am ineligible to enter the US and will be detained at the border for presenting 'fraudulently'.
I mentioned this elsewhere, but the U.S. is already denying entry visas for transgender travellers, either as a follow-up to this E.O. or based on the same principles as it. This doesn't seem hysterical to me.
This is just misinformation. Requiring factually accurate sex information to be submitted is not the same as discriminating against some group. It’s just common sense.
EDIT - response to defrost’s comment below:
The Australian passport doesn’t require fatally accurate information per your own link:
> Customers who identify as a gender other than male or female (intersex, indeterminate, unspecified, non-binary) may request that the gender in their ATD appear as X.
Sex isn’t a matter of “identifying” as something. It’s a biological reality. Progressive gender ideology cannot alter these facts, and it is unfortunate it has found its way into the identification documents of some countries.
The biological reality being that at birth babies are clearly reproductively male or reproductively female in roughly 98% of cases.
It's less clear for roughly 2% and indeterminate by any single means (chromosones, gametes, external organs) in small percentage ( 0.02% ) of cases.
Because of that biological reality various countries allow for people that were born neither [F] nor [M] to have a third option to avoid them having to lie on their passport.
The Australian passport requires factually accurate information and therefore allows [M], [F], and [X].
How do US border accept this under the current administration in light of the recent note by the current POTUS?
> The Australian passport doesn’t require fatally accurate information per your own link:
>> Customers who identify as a gender other than male or female (intersex, indeterminate, unspecified, non-binary) may request that the gender in their ATD appear as X.
No fatalities are required.
Passport applicants are required to be factually accurate about their identity and how they identify.
Perhaps you might think on that a little.
There is also the very real cases of people that have applied for and hold Australian passports that were born neither [M] nor [F] by any clear apriori definition.
Hence the applications for change, the court cases and the Federal ruling.
There's no real wriggle room wrt the edges cases of 25 million births, not all births fall into the neat buckets of ideal preconceived notions. Empirical observation begs to differ.
