Life and the Mind

from The New York Times

New York

Plans to Make Gender Personal Choice

By DAMIEN CAVE

Published: November 7, 2006

Separating anatomy from what it means to be a man or a woman, New York Cityis moving
forward with a plan to let people alter the sex on their birth certificate even
if they have not had sex-change surgery.
Under the rule being considered by the city’s Board of Health, which is
likely to be adopted soon, people born in the city would be able to change the
documented sex on their birth certificates by providing affidavits from a
doctor and a mental health professional laying out why their patients should be
considered members of the opposite sex, and asserting that their proposed
change would be permanent.
Applicants would have to have changed their name and shown that they had
lived in their adopted gender for at least two years, but there would be no
explicit medical requirements.
“Surgery versus nonsurgery can be arbitrary,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden,
the city’s health commissioner. “Somebody with a beard may have had
breast-implant surgery. It’s the permanence of the transition that matters
most.”
If approved, the new rule would put New
York at the forefront of efforts to redefine gender.
A handful of states do not require surgery for such birth certificate changes,
but in some of those cases patients are still not allowed to make the change
without showing a physiological shift to the opposite gender.

In New York,
the proposed change comes after four years of discussion among health
officials, an eight-member panel of transgender experts and vital records
offices nationwide. It is an outgrowth of the transgender community’s push to
recognize that some people may not have money to get a sex-change operation,
while others may not feel the need to undergo the procedure and are simply
defining themselves as members of the opposite sex. While it may be a radical
notion elsewhere, New York City
has often tolerated such blurring of the lines of gender identity.
And the proposal reflects how the transgender movement has become
politically potent beyond its small numbers, having roots in the muscular
politics of the city’s gay rights movement.

Transgender advocates consider the New
  York proposal an overdue bulwark against
discrimination that recognizes an emerging shift away from viewing gender as
simply the sum of one’s physical parts. But some psychiatrists and doctors are
skeptical of the move, saying sexual self-definition should stop at rewriting
medical history.

“They should not change the sex at birth, which is a factual record,” said
Dr. Arthur Zitrin, a Midtown psychiatrist who was on the panel of transgender
experts convened by the city. “If they wanted to change the gender for all the
compelling reasons that they’ve given, it should be done perhaps with an
asterisk.”

The change would lead to many intriguing questions: For example, would a man
who becomes a woman be able to marry another man? (Probably.) Would an adoption
agency be able to uncover the original sex of a proposed parent? (Not without a
court order.) Would a woman who becomes a man be able to fight in combat, or
play in the National Football League? (These areas have yet to be explored.)

The Board of Health, which weighs recommendations drafted by the Department
of Health and Mental Hygiene, is scheduled to vote on the proposal in December,
and officials say they expect it to be adopted.

At the final public hearing for the birth certificate proposal last week, a
string of advocates and transsexuals suggested that common definitions of
gender, especially its reliance on medical assessments, should be abandoned.
They generally praised the city for revisiting its 25-year-old policy that lets
people remove the sex designation from their birth certificate if they have had
sexual reassignment surgery. Then they demanded more freedom to choose.

Michael Silverman, executive director of the Transgender Legal Defense and
Education Fund, said transgender people should not have to rely on affidavits
from a health care system that tends to be biased against them. He said that
many transgender people cannot afford sex-change surgery or therapy, and often
do not consider it necessary.

Another person who testified, Mariah Lopez, 21, said she wanted a new birth
certificate to prevent confusion, and to keep teachers, police officers and
other authority figures from embarrassing her in public or accusing her of
identity theft.

A few weeks ago, at a welfare office in Queens, Ms. Lopez said she included
a note with her application for public assistance asking that she be referred
to as Ms. when her turn for an interview came up. It did not work. The woman
handling her case repeatedly addressed her as Mister.

“The thing is, I don’t even remember what it’s like to be a boy,” Ms. Lopez
said, adding that she received a diagnosis of transgender identity disorder at
age 6. She asked to be identified as a woman for this article.

The eight experts who addressed the birth certificate issue strongly
recommended that the change be made, for the practical reasons Ms. Lopez
identified. For public health studies, people who have changed their gender
would be counted according to their sex at birth.

But some psychiatrists said that eliminating identification difficulties for
some transgender people also opened the door to unwelcome advances from
imposters.

“I’ve already heard of a ‘transgendered’ man who claimed at work to be ‘a
woman in a man’s body but a lesbian’ and who had to be expelled from the
ladies’ restroom because he was propositioning women there,” Dr. Paul McHugh, a
member of the President’s Council of Bioethics and chairman of the psychiatry
department at Johns Hopkins University,
wrote in an e-mail message on the subject. “He saw this as a great injustice in
that his behavior was justified in his mind by the idea that the categories he
claimed for himself were all ‘official’ and had legal rights attached to them.”

The move to ease the requirements for altering one’s gender identity comes
after
New York has adopted other measures aimed at blurring the lines of gender
identification. For instance, a new shelter policy approved in January now
allows beds to be distributed according to appearance, applying equally to
postoperative transsexuals, cross-dressers and “persons perceived to be
androgynous.”

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority also agreed last month to let
people define their own gender when deciding whether to use the men’s or
women’s bathrooms.

Joann Prinzivalli, 52, a lawyer for the New York Transgender Rights
Organization, a man who has lived as a woman since 2000, without surgery, said
the changes amount to progress, a move away from American culture’s misguided
fixation on genitals as the basis for one’s gender identity.

“It’s based on an arbitrary distinction that says there are two and only two
sexes,” she said. “In reality the diversity of nature is such that there are
more than just two, and people who seem to belong to one of the designated
sexes may really belong to the other.”

Wow. I didn’t expect that. It’s here for just one more night at The Hyland Cinema. The movie trailer gives a pretty good idea of the mood of the movie. Lots and lots of fun. This being the small southwestern Ontario city that it is, I did see it in a near empty movie theatre and I regret that.

If you go back to my ""why?" post I tried to explain why I thought blogging might be fun–less stress than real academic writing, more liberal inthe range of topics I could address, less fussy editing and for the most part that’s been true. I haven’t been able to resist going back and fixing typos in old entries–old habits die hard–but I have resisted the temptation to write, rewrite, and rewrite some mroe before I post. That’s been fun. However, now I’ve been asked for permission to reprint in a more formal setting some of the blog entries. Our local anti-violence against women centre, organizer and sponsor of the talks on sex work, wants to include some of my reflections on those discussions in their newsletter. And I have been asked to expand the piece on bisexual monogamy for the American Philosophical Association newsletter on GLBT issues. Fun. But more like real work. Luckily I have a job where even the real work doesn’t feel much like work. (I often think it’s a huge advantage of my blue collar roots that my intellectual labour often feels like a lark–Wow, they are paying me to do this? )

Those who wish to abolish death (whether by
physical or metaphysical means)–at what stage of life do they want the process
to be halted? At the age of 20? At 35, in our prime? To be 35 for two years
sounds attractive, certainly. But for 3 years? A little dull, surely. For for 5
years–ridiculous. For 10–tragic. This film is so absorbing that we want this
bit to go on and on. You mean, you want the projector stopped, to watch a
single motionless frame? No, no, no, but perhaps you’d like the whole sequence
made up as an endless band, and projected indefinitely? Not that, either. The
sea and the stars and the wastes of the desert go on forever and will not die.
But the sea and the stars and the wastes of the desert are dead already.

by
Michael Frayn, Constructions, 1933

 I talk about immortality in my course on philosophy and
death. I begin by noting it’s not the case that the choice is immortality or
our current life span, thinking about the question from the point of view of
what one would most prefer. Surely we could say that 80 is not enough, while at
the same time thinking that forever would be too much. Those of who favour
extension of the human life span needn’t have immortality as our goal. But what
I like about the Frayn passage is the connection he draws between change and
life itself. I think about this in terms of my children and the speed at which
they change. It seemed barely had they been born that they grew into toddlers now
older children and I miss so much the babies they were. Children lose that newborn
smell and feel so quickly. And yet would I want them to be babies forever? No.
At what age would I pause and spend more time? Fast forward the terrible twos
for certain. I could freeze the babies in time and have the new people my
children were becoming as well. Imagine a house full of babies and their later
selves at various stages! Too many children. No, change seems built into our
relationships with children and with other adults too. Sometimes I miss the 20
year old I fell in love with though he’s still with me in his 40 something
form. So it’s not just our own younger selves we long for. But freezing
ourselves or others in time is not a happy alternative. So as much as I liked
35, I must admit I look forward to 50 as well. Bring it on.

"It’s not excellence which leads to celebrity, but
celebrity which leads to excellence. One makes one’s reputation, and one’s
reputation enables one to achieve the conditions in which one can do good work”.
– Michael Frayn

I love Michael Frayn’s writing. I often use his prose on death when teaching my large undergraduate class
on the subject. That’s a blog entry for another time. But the quotation above
got me thinking about the junior faculty hiring in which we’re engaged and the
issue of who becomes an academic star, this year’s hot commodity on the
academic job market. Many people think that because those people so identified
as intellectually HOT do go on to achieve great things that our ability to spot
brilliance is dead on. Some colleagues act as if they owned “genius detectors”
which allow them to judge on the basis of one good question, one brow furrowed
just the right way at just the right time or one speedy reply to a tough question
that so-and-so is really smart. But I often have a thought like the Frayn
quotation above. At least in some cases, the hot shots become real hot shots
because we expect more of them. We follow their careers, read their papers, and
attend their talks with heightened expectations. Of course, they also tend to
get jobs at pressure cooker universities with high research demands, little
teaching to get in the way, and a real “publish or perish” environment. A
colleague once commented that he suspected you could take any of the candidates
on the academic job market, plunk them down into that environment, with that
amount of attention and expectation and they’d go on to achieve great things. Years
after we could pat ourselves on the back, say what a good job we’ve done, and
note how well our genius detectors work.

I try to remember this humbling thought when I reflect on my
own academic success and attribute it to hard work. Hard work is part of the
story. But it was getting a good academic job in the first place made the hard
work rewarding. There were people in grad school with me who didn’t get tenure
track jobs at research intensive universities and their careers now look
different than mine. So I did work hard but I was also lucky.

An aside: Those of us concerned about equity wonder about
the epistemic basis of these quick and certain judgments. Our feminist dean
asks “Is the preference for the quick reply any more than an aesthetic
preference? Doesn’t it matter more how good the reply is, not how fast it comes?”
Others worry whether those of us socialized to smile our faces off—make others comfortable
and happy at all times—can ever really look smart in that deep, in thought, furrowed
brow kind of way. (Maybe someone should market brow wrinkling cream—a kind
of anti-Botox—for academic performance enhancement!)  Our equity guide asks if we can “hear” soft
voices, southern accents, lilting speech as “smart”? Never mind the tendency to
discomfort if the candidate is disabled, outside prevailing norms for gender,
or clearly of a non-standard sexual orientation.
I’m thinking lots about hiring these days as we set out to replace the 1/3 of the department about to retire–able bodied, straight white men all. It’s an exciting challenge and I’m glad to be involved.

Thurs. Nov. 23rd - 7pm   

Patty’s On King   

207 King Street, London, 519-438-7281 

  *This is a women only event*   

  For more information call Linda at 519.435.0972   

Background: I don’t think I’ve laughed so hard lately as I did reading this piece in The Stranger  called "Ted Haggard’s Crystal Cathedral: A Visit to the Gayest Place on Earth." But it also made me reflect on my experience with GLBT folk in the United Church. When I walked into our neighbourhood United Church on a Sunday morning I assumed that the place had lots of gay and lesbian members of the congregation. The place seemed full of men and women who I’d take to be queer. However, as months passed I found out I was all wrong. All of the men I thought were gay turned out to be married to women, in some cases to the very women I’d assumed were dykes. I felt like I was in some sort of land beyond the looking glass where nothing was as it seemed. Later I came to discover a deep well of homophobia in my neighbourhood church and after a year of slogging through meetings of our church’s marriage policy committee, my family left the congregation after a 28-4 vote by the church board against same sex marriage. This despite the fact that the United Church at the national level is a staunch supporter of same sex marriage. Being raised a good Catholic–leaving the church for the usual teen reasons plus hatred for its gender and sexual orientation politics– I assumed that the national governing body could have its way with individual local churches but I was wrong. I learned just why there are so many Protestant denominations! So we’ve moved on to an affirming congregation where the issue is done and settled, gay and lesbian weddings are common, and the church has a float in gay pride. But I still wonder about the people I met at my old church and had assumed were my partners in this struggle. I am sure there is some sociological research out there about religion and the closet and the connection between the two. Ted Haggard brought all this to mind again.

Act III, of the play by George Bernard Shaw, banned by the British censor in 1893

Vivie has come to terms with her mother’s work as a prostitute but she has no sympathy at all for those who make such work options available. Here is arguing with Crofts, her suitor and mother’s business partner, who is defending his choice of investing in Mrs Warren’s business venture:

"VIVIE. My mother was a very poor woman who had no reasonable choice but to do as she did. You were a rich gentleman; and you did the same for the sake of 35 per cent. You are a pretty common sort of scoundrel, I think. That is my optinion of you."

CROFTS [after a stare: not at all displeased, and much more at his ease on these frank terms than on their former ceremonious ones] Ha! ha! ha! ha! Go it, little missie, go it: it doesnt hurt me and it amuses you. Why the devil shouldnt I invest my money that way? I take the interest on my capital like other people: I hope you don’t think I dirty my own hands with the work. Come! you wouldnt refuse the acquaintance of my mother’s cousin the Duke of Belgravia because some of the rents he gets are earned in queer ways. You wouldnt cut the Archbishop of Canterbury, I suppose, because the Ecclesiastical Commissioners have a few publicans and sinners among their tenants. Do you remember  your Crofts scholarship at Newnham? Well, that was founded by my brother the M.P. He gets his 22 per cent out of a factory with 600 girls in it, and not one of them getting wages enough to live on. How d’ye suppose they manage when they have no family to fall back on? Ask your mother. And do you expect me to turn my back on 35 per cent when all the rest are pocketing what they can, like sensible men? No such fool! If youre going to pick and choose your acquaintances on moral principles, youd better clear out of this country, unless you want to cut yourself out of all decent society."

Mrs. Warren’s Profession was put on by the English Department of my university this past weekend and it got me thinking again about the ethics of sex work. I like it that Shaw’s harshest words are for the hypocrisy of middle and upper class society, in which, paraphrasing Shaw, the best kept secrets are the ones everyone knows. I can also see why it was banned given its  harsh criticism of factory work, women’s choices, the condition of working women’s lives. What’s interesting though is that Viv (the young independent woman whose education was financed, unbeknownst to her, by her mother’s work as a prostitute, then later a brothel keeper) forgives her mother’s early choice to work as a prostitute, given the options available, but cannot forgive her later choice to go into the business herself.  Viv draws a clear moral line between those who take such work to survive and those who makes such work available, and who make a living of its profits. I’d like to think more about this aspect of the ethics of sex work. As usual what I’m curious about are the ways in which the wrongs of the brother owner are different than the wrongs of the factory owner, for both profit off the labour of others, work that would be none by no one were the alternative not starvation or the streets for oneself and one’s children. Shaw says he wrote the play, "to draw attention to the truth that prostitution is caused, not by
female depravity and male licentiousness, but simply by underpaying,
undervaluing, and overworking women so shamefuly that the poorest of
them are forced to resort to prostitution to keep body and soul
together."