I have been pointed (thanks Kate!) at a transcript of discussions in the committee stage of the Identity Documents Bill currently going through Parliament. In particular note the comments of Dr. Julian Huppert, MP (LD, Cambridge):
There are a number of different circumstances: there are people who are neutrois and inter-sex people—there is a complicated collection. The simple solution to many of these circumstances is just not to have gender information on any of these identity documents. The people I spoke to would push for that very strongly. They are concerned about a repeat of what happened in Trafalgar square at Pride 2008 when there were inappropriate demands for gender recognition certificates. Hon. Members will know some of the history of that.
There does not seem to be a need for identity documents of any kind to have gender information. It is not a very good biometric; it is roughly a 50:50 split. Military ID, such as the MOD90, which obviously can have quite a high security clearance, contains no gender information. That might be what we should look at. It is certainly what some of the people I spoke to were keen on.
To summarise, the transgender people I spoke to said they did not want this new clause. I therefore do not support it because I support them.
So, Toiletgate makes it to Parliament. And some remarkable good sense being talked by an MP. My congratulations to the people of Cambridge on their electoral choice.
That is good. He was a little less positive about the rape anonymity thing, sadly.
I didn’t know MOD IDs didn’t contain gender information, but I do know that on the MOD personnel systems, gender is an amendable field – sex changes actually seem to be (comparatively) common in the armed forces (whether this relates to overcompensatory factors – e.g. some men trying to prove to others or themselves how very very male they are until they eventually accept they actually aren’t – I don’t know).
I think that Brian is right about men trying to prove how male they are, when they have good reason to doubt it. Most of the male to female TSs I’ve met seem to have jobs that most people would identify as “masculine”: truck drivers, carpenters, that sort of thing.
It is certainly true that many trans women have had very “male” jobs before transitioning. A couple of high profile examples would be Calpernia Addams (who was in the army) and Jan Morris (who was the reporter on Edmund Hilary’s Everest expedition). On the other hand, April Ashley and Caroline Cossey went straight into being show girls before making it big as models, so it is by no means typical. Trans women may also take to jobs like truck driving because it allows them to be on their own most of them time, and spend many nights in anonymous hotel rooms where they can be themselves without fear of neighbors. Trans people may take on dangerous work because they have no hope for their futures.
We humans have an annoying tendency to try to discern the secret psychological motives behind what other people do. It is, I suspect, a lot of what sells celebrity magazines. Trans people are especially vulnerable to this sort of thing because there’s a common meme that holds that they must be crazy, which invites people to make up hidden motives for what they do. Everyone is different, and the best way to understand their motives is to ask them.
As an addendum to the above, here’s a very nice piece about why cis people should stop concocting explanations about why trans people do what they do.