Is NYC dumber than San Francisco?

[Guest]

I think POL is one man against the world here - not just ziggy and SB, if the academic forum ever had more participants.
I too want to disagree with you. But I want to take one step further.
All we are saying here, we allow citizens to change their "registrations". She is ALREADY a woman to all people relevant. For all the people who don't know her and decide to not accept whatever her OWN choice is, fuck them. They are irrelevant anyway.
Often I see men without dicks walking around and disgusted to death. I really don't care what government rigistration he has. He is a man to me.
btw, W was our governor here. I would hope he can be the SF mayor for couple of years - it certainly can bring down the house price there for me to have a chance to move there and vote his ass back here  

[Mai-Kee]

Excellent move in NYC! Very promising to see that some places on Earth already arrived in the 21st century! Well done!    

To force ones perception of gender into any kind of mutilation has the smell of inquisition and is simply medieval!
That in a forum like this would be any doubt that such a law isn't a major step forward in transgender issues is just absurd! I don't get it, what are we talking about here since years...


MK

[Mai-Kee]

... and here we go.... ooops.... why I'm actually not really surprised.....


City Drops Plan to Change Definition of Gender


By DAMIEN CAVE
Published: December 6, 2006
New York City€™s Board of Health unexpectedly withdrew a proposal yesterday that would have allowed people to alter the sex on their birth certificates without sex-change surgery.

The plan, if passed, would have put New York at the forefront of a movement to eliminate anatomical considerations when defining gender. It had been lauded by some mental health professionals and transgender advocates who said it would reduce discrimination against men and women who lived as members of the opposite sex.

But after the proposed change was widely publicized recently, board members and officials with the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene said that a surge of new concerns arose. Vital records experts said that new federal rules regarding identification documents, due next year, could have forced the policy to be scrapped.

Health officials said patients at hospitals asked how doctors would determine who would be assigned to the bed next to them. And among law enforcement officials, there were concerns about whether prisoners with altered birth certificates could be housed with female prisoners €” even if they still had male anatomies.

€œThis is something we hadn€™t fully thought through, frankly,€ said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the city€™s health commissioner. €œWhat the birth certificate shows does have implications beyond just what the birth certificate shows.€

The board did approve a more minor change: Under a law passed in 1971, people who can prove that they had sex-change surgery could delete the male or female designation from their birth certificates. Now, they can change it.

Dr. Frieden said that this would bring New York City in line with most of the country and would help alleviate the transgender community€™s concerns about discrimination. He said that going any further would have thrust New York into uncharted territory.

€œWe felt going into it that it was fairly standard, that other states had it on the books,€ Dr. Frieden said. €œBut as we looked into it, we discovered that it was implicit, not explicit.€

He said it was €œunfortunate€ that the panel of experts convened by the department to address the proposal did not include anyone from institutions that may have been affected, like jails, schools or hospitals.

The panel instead consisted of doctors, mental-health professionals and advocates who overwhelmingly supported the plan.

Board members said the city should not act alone. Though the board has eagerly jumped ahead with bans on trans fats and smoking in restaurants, it decided against legislating gender on its own.

€œWe are not the only Department of Health. There is also the New York State Department of Health, federal regulations, and we cannot make this decision alone, said Dr. Sixto R. Caro, a board member and private practitioner in Brooklyn and Manhattan. €œWe must make the decision together with the Department of Health of New York State. That€™s one of the reasons we had no choice but to wait.€

But according to some supporters of the withdrawn proposal, the motivations behind the city€™s decision may have more to do with comments like the one sent to the health department by e-mail that asked, €œAre you guys losing all sense of moral values?€

James Jay Carafano, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group, said that the new federal identification rules would leave room for public and private agencies to address the issue of the gender.

However, transgender advocates accused the city of bowing to pressure from institutions and residents who feared interacting too closely with men who live as women and women who live as men. They noted that the city would have required doctors to verify that the gender change was permanent.

€œI fear that because of the public attention the proposed change had attracted, they lacked the courage to give the proposed amendment the consideration it deserved,€ said Shannon Minter, a board member and lawyer for Transgender Law and Policy Institute in New York. €œThat€™s very disappointing.€

[post-op lover]

Just as I said: there are a lot more people involved. Thanks for the update. Nice to see I out-prophecied a whole board of health for NYC. I'd hate to see them turn their attention to anything remotely challenging.

[mirimark]

O H I O  !
God Damn,  you should have seen it.   I was sitting on the steps of my trailer when there it was,  A  Fucking UFO.   I'm not kidding.    Three Green Little men stepped out of the Craft and approached me.   One grabbed me by the hand and the MotherShip Beamed me up.

They Laid me on a Cold Stainless Steel Table and Stuck a Probe of sorts up my ass.   And ever since then,  I've been cutting heads off of Chickens and worshiping the Devil.

  Damn,  and to think,   I was once such a Smart and Sweet Boy.
Fucking Aliens.

[Guest]

I guess I'm wondering why the government would need to know or care about your sex / gender in any case, and why it would be in anyone's business.

I'm of the personal opinion that we are all (Speaking for the US) way too involved with our government as it is. I am of the firm belief that a person should be able to live their entire life and die without ever having met a government employee or filling out a government form.

All rights are individual rights, and universal rights. It's called freedom. Now, certainly not every government around the world respects them, and in my opinion no government respects them near as much as I think they should- although I think your general Western Civ (US, England, Australia) tends to do about as good as it currently gets.

Freedom is the only word necessary for the complete definition of individual rights. Once freedom is said, nothing else needs to be explained any further. Freedom, it's quite simple.

There is no such thing as civil rights. There are no "women's rights", "gay rights", "transgender rights", left hand red-sox fans rights.

Because all rights are individual rights, you neither gain nor lose any rights by becoming a member of a class.

I do not gain any rights if I am an individual and also black, married, a woman, gay, etc. I also do not lose any rights by belonging to a specific class.

All this fractured political wrangling only benefits lawyers and politicians who thrive off the chum created. All human beings should recognize that freedom is the ultimate right, and redress their grievances to their individual governments until freedom is the only right necessary, and the one completely and wholy recognized.

Freedom.