Trans people in Florida can no longer update their driver’s licenses: A new state rule may expose trans people to criminal or civil penalties if they try to update their documentation.
This doesn't even make sense from an administrative standpoint. The purpose of government identification is identification. If I can't update my driver's license to make me easier to identify then the entire purpose of having a gender on the ID card is moot
This is a weak justification, but here is a strawman:
If a person is involved in a firey buscrash, it is helpful to the coroner to know what biological sex someone was born as to help with identification (different bone structures etc).
To tear that strawman down again, there is absolutely no reason that the drivers licence couldnt show their gender, and the authority could also track their sex in their system.
Of course, this is Florida, the answer is obvious, they are doing it to fuck over trans people....
I understand that not being able to change forms of ID can cause problems for trans people, but if I were trans, I would be terrified to out myself to the state of Florida. I feel for my brothers and sisters affected by this bullshit.
That justification gets even weaker when there's no fire in the lethal crash. They're not looking at burned skeletons, they're just looking at corpses.
Also! Skeletal differences are actually minimal in people who transitioned at a young enough age, so that wouldn't even be helpful in their case.
Yeah, its a weak justification, but worth lining up, so that it can be knocked back down.
In this strawman, the point is to be prepared for the worst case, which would be skeletal remains only.
The skeletal differences being minimal depending on the age of transition is interesting, do you have a source? Id like to know more.
Of course that gets even muddier for this strawman, because the authority could make up arbitrary rules like "If you transition before X years old, you can change your official gender". Which ends up essentially the same as the "when is it life" discussion, and we all know how that panned out.
The defining skeletal differences are mostly in the pelvis, which undergoes much of its development in puberty. Intervention in those years should allow for trans teens to develop along affirming physiological lines, rather than being mutilated by a dysphoric puberty.
Buuuuut I did overstate my case, though; such early treatment is still on the rarer side, so it doesn't look like there's definitive answers on how that impacts skeletal development. We can draw conclusions, I think, but the literature is mostly focused on the psychological development rather than looking at physiology.
Yeah, possibly needs more research. I read something about bone density being mostly unchanged, but that may also be intervention age dependant as well.
Also, as a fairly contentious issue, the literature is also prone to biases.
Thanks for your response though, I appreciate it :)
If a person is involved in a firey buscrash, it is helpful to the coroner to know what biological sex someone was born as to help with identification (different bone structures etc).
Yeah... no. The bone structures aren't that different. It's more likely that anthropologist can't identify the sex by bones alone than they can. I also can't think of a different reason for it, but there really doesn't need to be a reason for them to just be bigots.
There are stereotypical differences between the two, yes, but it isn't as obvious as just having male and female bones. It is often unable to be determined based on bone structure alone, and historically there has been a lot of misidentification from this.
I would have said it isnt always obvious, but yeah, humans exist on a spectrum.
When was trying to find articles about this topic I kept hitting "trans people don't belong in sport" type articles, which have a very clear bias. Thanks for the link :)
Well, what is the function of having sex/gender on an ID? It's to make someone more identifiable, right?
That means that "verification" only needs to be visual. The purpose is to be able to tell, at a glance, that the ID and the person are a match. That's why eye color and height are on there too. Precise record keeping is for the court house and hospital records, not a driver's license.
By using sex and making that unchangeable it actually makes my ID less useful for identifying me.
This process is already gatekept, to my knowledge. In my state, changing your legal gender id or name requires going through the courts and a substantial amount of legal paperwork - even if you do so without a lawyer, there are some substantial fees associated with that process. Not to mention if someone wanted to become less identifiable, they probably wouldn't want to do that in a way that is available as public record. Personally, I'd probably just get a haircut - they're a lot faster and a lot cheaper.
Additionally, banning everyone - especially banning exclusively trans people - from fixing their documentation is not a reasonable solution to your hypothetical problem, a fact so obvious anyone arguing in good faith almost certainly would have caught it.
That's an advantage that trans people who can 'pass' have, but not every person looks physically enough like their expressed gender and suddenly they're "a man in a dress" or something.
No I didn't. You asked how they will verify gender. The answer is that they will call trans women who still look biologically male men and not allow them to call themselves women.