British Committee Says No Evidence Is Needed to Change Gender on Passports or Driver’s Licenses

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British Committee Says No Evidence Is Needed to Change Gender on Passports or Driver’s Licenses

‘I think I am a man/woman/of no sex, therefore I am.’

The United Kingdom’s Women and Equalities Committee released a report in January that urged the government to do more to tackle discrimination against transgender individuals. Mims Davies, who sits on the committee, said, “If Britain is to remain a global beacon of tolerance then these recommendations have to be quickly implemented.”

The committee recommended that the “requirement for trans people to produce a doctor’s letter in order to change the gender shown in their passport inappropriately medicalizes what should be simply an administrative matter. This requirement must be dropped.”

In a Spectator article, British journalist Melanie Phillips argued against the reports’ suggestions:

Gender politics is all about subjective feelings. It has nothing to do with fairness or equality. It embodies instead an extreme egalitarianism which holds that any evidence of difference is a form of prejudice.

Instead of requiring medical “proof” of sex-change treatment, the committee says everyone’s word should be taken for granted. “I think I am a man/woman/of no sex, therefore I am,” as Phillips paraphrased Descartes.

(Listen to Trumpet Daily Radio Show host Stephen Flurry discuss this topic from 33:00.)

According to Phillips, attempts to diagnose transgender children have created more problems. She wrote:

[G]ender fluidity itself creates victims. Prof. Paul McHugh is the former chief psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins hospital in the U.S. In the 1960s, he pioneered sex-reassignment surgery—but subsequently abandoned it because of the problems it left in its wake. Most young boys and girls who seek sex reassignment, McHugh has written, have psychosocial issues and presume that such treatment will resolve them. “The grim fact is that most of these youngsters do not find therapists willing to assess and guide them in ways that permit them to work out their conflicts and correct their assumptions. Rather, they and their families find only ‘gender counselors’ who encourage them in their sexual misassumptions.”

“It would take an extraordinary amount of naïveté or willful blindness to imagine that such legislation will not be exploited,” wrote Rebecca Reilly-Cooper, a lecturer of political theory at the University of Warwick. “Once self-declared gender identity becomes a legally protected characteristic, there is nothing to prevent this from being exploited and abused by men.”

Trumpet managing editor Joel Hilliker wrote about the growing trend of transgenderism and where it is heading:

We are looking at the next “logical” step in society’s wholesale departure from the understanding of masculinity and femininity. Though the concept of your sex having a bearing on your role in society and within a family has dominated human relations for humankind’s entire history, we are now throwing it out as if the facts are subjective. Today it is viewed with contempt. Now, it’s not just roles we reject, but biological absolutes. Everything is relative. Anything is respectable. Nothing is deviant.

Read the full article, “Let Boys Be Girls. Or Goys or Birls,” to see how this trend affects you.