Tuesday’s New York Times featured a 2,000-word intellectual wasteland by reporter Amy Harmon, “New Passport Rule Sends Blunt and Sweeping Message to Trans Americans.”
Harmon's reporter page explains that she's all about avoiding biological truth: “I am a New York Times reporter covering how shifting conceptions of gender affect everyday life in the United States." Her latest pulled out all the sympathetic stops, opposing the assumed atrocity of your passport listing your actual sex, not the one you “chose” later in life.
The Trump administration has pushed for restrictions on transgender Americans in nearly every arena, including serving in the military and playing on sports teams, but perhaps no measure has struck as broad and direct a blow to their identity and participation in public life as a new policy on passports that the Supreme Court this month allowed to take effect.
Passports must now reflect the sex on a person’s original birth certificate, regardless of whether that matches the person’s gender identity....
Harmon allowed the fact-based side of the gender war to make its case: “Passports should identify people based on verifiable facts, not subjective feelings.” But her heart was with the extreme transgender lobby.
Critics of the passport policy say the effects of the change are practical and far-reaching for nearly all trans and nonbinary Americans, a group that is estimated to be about three million people, or about 1 percent of the population age 13 and older. The new requirement could create confusion and allegations of misrepresentation, they said, for people whose appearance may not match the sex marker on their passport when using it to travel, open a bank account or apply for a job.
Harmon piled on the most paranoid readings from the most paranoid transgenders she could locate to paint a sensible policy as totalitarian.
For many trans Americans, the policy feels like a blunt, official declaration that the federal government views their gender identities as neither real nor meaningful, and it raises the prospect that such views will spread.
“What this says is that you, as a transgender person, do not matter to the state, and the state gets to tell you who you are,” said Imara Jones, a transgender journalist who runs a media company, TransLash. “This is not in accord with the way that citizens and citizenship has been treated in America.”
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Some opponents of the passport rule argue that gender identity — rather than sex on a person’s original birth certificate — is their sex. They say they want the sex on their passport to reflect the sex they live their lives as, and to enable them to use their passports the way other Americans do, without facing another layer of questions at airports and elsewhere about their personal lives. The policy, critics say, also fails to account for a small group of intersex people with biological variations that do not fall within the standard male and female classifications.
Amid that sort of pseudo-scientific gobbledygook was one sensible paragraph:
The passport change is part of what the Trump administration says it sees as a way to dismantle “gender ideology,” which it has characterized as policies and beliefs that conflict with empirical realities about sex. The strategy has won support from some across the political spectrum who felt strong-armed during the Biden era to call trans women “women” and trans men “men,” to include trans athletes in girls and women’s sports or to use the word “sex” to mean “gender identity.’’
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But for many transgender people, the passport change feels more like an attack on them as people, not a debate about ideology around science or language. It suggests, they say, that their self-representation is intrinsically fraudulent.
It is. As she did in her piece on Covid mask die-hards, Harmon dug up people with seriously odd demands on society while treating commonsense measures as the problem.
One transgender woman, a former deputy director of a cultural organization in New York who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear for her safety....carries extra documents: a copy of her state driver’s license with her updated name and gender; her original birth certificate, which describes her as male….
His birth certificate merely “describes her as male”? He is male. That’s how human biology worked until about 10 years ago.
