(no subject)

[dreamer_easy]

A new Australian law leaves transitioning transgender women and men stuck with their birth sex on their passport, making them vulnerable to suspicion and harassment when they travel overseas, as well as being just plain humiliating. It's a bit of bureaucratic nonsense which serves no purpose other than to add hassles and misery to peoples' lives.

Comments

[swordznsorcery.livejournal.com]

What do the government think people can get away with if a sex is not listed at all?

Exactly! Why this fascination with making people list their gender anyway? And always only the two options to choose from. I always refuse to tick either box in forms, but right now the government in the UK is trying to make us all carry ID cards with gender specified. Transsexuals, they say, will have to have two - one for each gender - at a cost of some estimated £100 each. Why?! I don't know about anybody else, but I'm not a gender. I'm just me. What is this fascination with trying to put us all in neat little boxes?

Sorry - long term lurker here. Hope nobody minds me cutting in. It's just that gender issues really tend to bug me.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

I wonder, quite seriously, how useful gender is when you're a security dude. At the library, where students aren't supposed to use each others' borrowing cards, it was sometimes useful in a very crude way, assuming you could correctly guess the card owner's gender from their name. But now we have photo IDs, just as a passport or an ID card would have a picture - surely that's about ten thousand times more useful and accurate in checking someone's identity than an M or an F. And anyway, how likely is it that someone Up To No Good would attract attention to themselves with an ID showing the "wrong" gender?

[swordznsorcery.livejournal.com]

Good point. I don't know how Australian passports work, but in the UK the new thing is for "bio-metric" ones. The ID cards are also intended to be bio-metric. Fingerprints and retinal scans included. And with all that, they really feel they need an M or an F as well?!

I have my great-grandmother's wartime ID card, and it doesn't mention gender at all. Bearing in mind that this was from the days when the country was seriously under threat, it has her name and address on it, and not even a photograph. That was felt to be enough. What's changed?

Love your trilobite, btw. :)

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

With all that biodata, maybe they should just put "46XX" or whatever on the card. :-)