Bella Boyd
Nov 6 · 2 min read

There’s difference between ‘gender’ and all the examples that you raised of people self-reporting their feelings: self-reporting one’s feelings about gender gives one access to spaces from, which they’d ordinarily be barred.

There are some spaces for which we need to prove a characteristic or condition — you can attend the doctor and self-report depression and expect the doctor to take that claim at face value, to the extent that she will ask you about your life and probably refer you for at least one counselling session. You can self-report disordered eating and expect some treatment. You cannot present as a fairly healthy looking person, claim to suffer from anorexia, and expect to be immediately placed into an inpatient facility for people with particularly severe eating disorders. This is because the condition or characteristic claimed has a universal, physically observable symptom (you don’t need to be skeletal to have an eating disorder, but you do need to be emaciated to have a severe case of anorexia nervosa).

If your marriage granted a male person access to women’s sports or shelters, we’d be rather more set on interrogating the basis for it.

If “gender identity” grants you something you wouldn’t otherwise have, it needs a solid basis. If it grants you none, it doesn’t. If you can legally compel people to say that they think you’re a woman, even though they think you’re a man, this needs a stronger basis than mere self-reporting. If women’s shelters are ordinarily barred to male people, because of the disparities in offending patterns and physical strength, then that rule is rendered nonsensical if male people can access these spaces solely because they claim to think they’re women.

    Bella Boyd

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