Tuesday, October 08, 2019

SCOTUS AND GENDER

by Bob Walsh

One of the cases being taken up by SCOTUS this term is a gender identity issue. Right now discrimination laws prohibit discrimination in most areas on the basis of gender. The matter before the court is whether or not sexual persuasion, gender IDENTITY and transgender falls under the "gender' umbrella or if these situations do not and must be addressed separately.

The court could determine that your gender is determined by your plumbing at birth, or by what you feel like when you wake up in the morning, or pretty much anything in between. I can't imagine the court will go with the hard liberal interpretation (you are what you feel like at any particular time) just because of the operational problems if nothing else.

I know right now this question is causing significant and legitimate problems within amateur athletics, especially women's athletics, as "women" who are structurally male have essentially running over female competitors. It is also causing significant problems for jail and prison management that needs to be worked out, especially now that some states allow birth certificates to be "corrected" for gender or allow some sort of non-binary designation on driver's licenses and similar documents.

I know when I retired from the CA prison system it was pretty simple. If your birth certificate said MALE and you had a penis you were male. Anything else was up for argument. That isn't quite so clear-cut any more.

No comments: