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?
