Quote of the week
[T]he moral point of the matter is never reached by calling what happened by the name of ‘genocide’ or by counting the many millions of victims: extermination of whole peoples had happened before in antiquity, as well as in modern colonization. It is reached only when we realize this happened within the frame of a legal order and that the cornerstone of this ‘new law’ consisted of the command ‘Thou shall kill,’ not thy enemy but innocent people who were not even potentially dangerous, and not for any reason of necessity but, on the contrary, even against all military and other utilitarian calculations. … And these deeds were not committed by outlaws, monsters, or raving sadists, but by the most respected members of respectable society.
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on The Banality of Evil
A man by any other name looks just as sweet…
Julio Cuesta on Tuesday became the first person in Spain legally to change their sex/gender description without undergoing surgery under a new law approved last month. Julio, who was born a woman, obtained the right to have his gender description officially altered to that of a man after taking hormones for at least two years.
In
(Disclosure: I have been advising the group Gender DynamiX, who is now assisting individuals to challenge the decisions of the Home Affairs officials.)
Of course, despite all the evidence to the contrary, society continues to essentialise sex and gender as fixed, unchanging and exclusive categories. Many people experience their sex or their gender in more fluid terms. Some do not physically conform to the categories of “male” or “female”, while others do not associate themselves with the sex or gender that their bodies are supposed to reflect.
Yet from the moment we are born, we are policed and disciplined to ensure that we conform to prevailing societal sex and gender stereotypes. This is deeply oppressive to all of us because it diminishes our ability to make choices about our sex and gender identity and behaviour. However, because sex and gender policing is so all pervasive in our society, it is difficult to bring across the human rights angle to this issue.
The law therefore helps to perpetuate the existing oppressive sex/gender regime, enforcing a certain cultural construction of the world on all of us. Why should it matter to the state or anyone else whether we call ourselves a “man”, a “woman” or anything else? Why is it important for someone with a penis not to be effeminate or for someone with a vagina to wear a dress? There is nothing inherently good about these categories and there surely is no need to limit our sex or gender identities to these two categories only.
It is time that human rights law take note of the oppressive nature of the sex/gender dichotomy and begin to seek ways to accommodate a wider variety of sex and gender identities in our society. A start can be made by applying the existing law properly.
