Sometimes there just aren’t any words…

Fortunately this story is developing in Canada and not in the United States, at least for now. Katherine Timpf at National Review Online brings us a story of social justice or LGBT rights or… I have no idea what this is to be honest. But the elected representatives of the good people in British Columbia have apparently heard the plaintive cries of the oppressed and are set to consider removing gender classifications from birth certificates.

No… really.

The Human Rights Tribunal in British Columbia will consider completely eliminating gender designations from birth certificates in response to complaints from the Trans Alliance Society (TAS) and other transgender individuals, according to an article in the National Post.

According to the complainants, we need to stop acting as if doctors can tell the sex of a baby just by looking at the baby’s genitals:

Birth certificates [may] give false information about people and characterize them in a way that is actually wrong, that assumes to be right, and causes people . . . actual harm,” said transgender woman and TAS chair Morgane Oger.

According to attorney barbara findlay (who insists we not use capital letters in her name) the antiquated and unfair practice of nosy government busybodies assigning gender on a government document when you’re only a baby is wrong because:

1. Those are not the only two genders, and
2. A person’s “gender develops” over time.

The reason that I said this was only in Canada for now is that the trend is already gaining traction on the home front. The Los Angeles-based Granada Hills Charter High School is already allowing boys who “self-identify as girls” to use the female locker room, even though a (naturally born) girl complained that one such boy stared strangely at her and also peeked at girls over the stalls while they used the toilet. The same thing happened on the other coast in Virginia. It’s even happening in Kentucky.

To place the blame where it truly belongs, we should be honest enough that this all started with Allie McBeal. Even though producer David E. Kelley claimed that the unisex bathroom on the show was only used to save space on the studio lot, he clearly let the genie out of the bottle and should apologize to the nation.

If somebody wants to say that they are the opposite gender from that indicated by their original equipment, that’s up to them. You can dress however you want as long as you’re not endangering anyone else. But as with all other matters of free speech in our society, that doesn’t mean that everyone else has to play along or that you don’t risk being offended by people’s reactions. Or at least that’s how it should be. How it will actually turn out in our courts when a similar movement inevitably shows up in the United States is far from certain.