Archive Columns: Sexuality

On Sexual Self-Identification  (Metro Philadelphia, May 30, 2002)

    City Council is showing a gift for metaphysics in the proposed bill to ban discrimination based on gender identity. It is a bewildering, vaguely Kantian piece of work that requires us to believe that reality is what any individual feels.

    Like most bills from City Council, it is exceedingly well meant, but it is hard not to wonder if we are not straining objectivity and the machinery of jurisprudence when we allow an individual to claim a status for himself (or perhaps, herself) that is not, to put it gently, factual.

    Take a deep breath.  Here is how the bill defines gender identity: "Self-perception, or perception by others, as male or female, and shall include a person's appearance, behavior, or physical characteristics, that may be in accord with, or opposed to, one's physical anatomy [or] chromosomal sex,..."

    Let's edit that: "Self-perception as male or female that may be opposed to one's physical anatomy." Now let's say what it means: "The sex one imagines onself to be or would have preferred being without regard to the sex one actually is."

    For starters, the use of "self-perception" is a bit odd, perception being usually based on observation. Self-conception would be more apt, especially since this conception by self will often fail to match the perception by others. But what is really disputable here is not the person's right to make his own reality, i.e. to be a good solipsist and claim that the self is the only truth. What's disputable is that the law requires everyone else to conspire in the fiction, to pretend that we are indifferent to what is or is not demonstrable.

    This nonchalance toward facts is fairly new for the legal system, though the logic seems to borrow from the champions of self esteem. In the way that they could believe that the lack of anything particularly estimable in a person should not disqualify him from self esteem, we are asked to believe that, say, the lack of a y-chromosome should not disqualify a person from maleness. The lack of self esteem for the one, and the lack of acceptance for the other, are both seen as the cause, rather than the result, of a maladjusted personality.

    There may be something to this view, but tolerance might be better advanced without requiring the citizenry to call a spade a diamond and then act as if it believed it, without requiring, in effect, that society view transgendering as normal. In the real world, it is asking rather a lot of an employer to view with perfect equality two 200 pound male PR directors, one in a nice suit and the other in a pert off-the-shoulder cocktail dress. Liberal decency obliges us to tolerance and empathy but not to accept a masquerade.

    There is a coherence in protecting the rights and certifying the new sex of real transsexuals, but the bill's committee, feeling expansive, did not limit the bill to those who have had or are undergoing medically supervised sex changes. This committee revision creates a weirdly subjective world in which wishes become reality, in which, put medically, pathologies become benign. If it passes I will immediately introduce a wealth identity bill, certifying self-perception as rich or poor that may be in accord, or opposed to, one's actual assets.

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