As of January 1, residents of New York City can change their birth certificates to legally indicate they believe they are not the male or female they were born. They can also legally declare they are neither male nor female, with a simple X.
For this change, one doesn’t need a note from a physician, psychiatrist, or any official, nor to have undergone any type of clothing, body, or hormonal change. To require any of these means the individual would have to submit to someone else’s expectation of what a male or female is, a serious gender theory no-no.
The entirely subjective declaration of the claimant is all a city clerk needs to amend this most fundamental of all legal documents. You simply say it’s so, and it is. The Associated Press, HuffPo, and other outlets reported that parents can indicate their newborn is neither male nor female, but this is not so. Michael Lanza, a spokesman for the NYC Department of Health, told the The Federalist the law only applies to adults. Youth of any age can claim male, female, or the “nonbinary” X with a parent or guardian’s attestation.
Mayor Bill de Blasio praised the new law, saying New Yorkers should tell their government who they are and “not the other way around.” It’s a cuddly sentiment, to be sure, but untrue. Suppose I told de Blasio and his department of health that I’m a teenage Laotian able-bodied paraplegic and member of his City Council. He would happily tell me what’s what and “not the other way around.” Even if I have a note from my parents.
But this is not the reason this law, and similar ones in other states, is madness. I don’t use that word rhetorically, combatively, morally or judgmentally. It’s wholly descriptive. So that there’s no misunderstanding, let me clarify what I mean in using the word madness: being in state of illusion, dementia, and instability, not only disconnected from, but being contrary to reality, all while pretending to be completely healthy.
Even though I’m a shameless religious conservative, let me step out on a limb and appeal to cold, calculated, orderly reason. Laws allowing citizens to change their birth certificates to either or no sex are completely contrary to reality, and here are some reasons why.
It Contradicts LGBT Self-Conception
First, it radically violates the LGBT conception of justice and equality. Guaranteed, it is just a matter of time until this fatal flaw reveals itself and is changed. But under their premises these new birth certificate laws (and their driver’s license cousins) are as bigoted as my childhood friend’s dad.
To him, there were only three races: Whites, blacks, and “Egyptians.” If you’re not one of the first two, the third was his convenient, and ignorant, catch-all category. New York City is doing the very same thing. Their X is Mr. Sofield’s “Egyptian.”
Imagine how this works. You arrive at the New York City Department of Health, totally stoked that you can now have your birth certificate declare “who you are really are.” You inform the clerk you are not the male or female you were haphazardly “assigned” at birth, but that you’re genderqueer, genderfluid, agender, bigender, pangender, polygender, androgyne, neutrois, or any of the other 50+ genders that supposedly exist.
The clerk responds, “Wonderful, honey. We’re just gonna put you down as X.” Yes, X! Never mind that New York City will legally and permanently refer to you by the sign teachers use to mark something wrong. Even those who play along with the game have to admit this is a major d’oh.
No One Is Nonbinary
Nonbinary is a belief that develops over time in one’s own self-perception. It is not an objective, medical fact. It cannot be confirmed or denied by any medical professional. It is not an intrinsic factor of one’s body, but a product of the mind (not the brain).
This is the bare fact of the matter. Every human body is either male or female. This, and this alone, is what a birth certificate records. (Intersex, an actual physiological and medical condition of ambiguous genitalia or reproductive organs, or confused chromosomes, is not a third gender or nonbinary.)
This Isn’t the Purpose of a Birth Certificate
A birth certificate, or death certificate for that matter, doesn’t record how one feels about or understands oneself. A birth certificate notes the facts of a birth, including what one is born as. It is an objective document recording a few essential facts about an event that happened on a particular day, time, and place: name of newborn, date and place of birth, parents’ names, handprints, footprints, and sex of the child.
These things do not change. The document does not amend itself according the child’s life-course, personal evolution, or self-understanding. That is not the document’s purpose. It cannot and should not be used for social engineering or personal affirmation.
It Fundamentally Contradicts Basic Gender Theory
Let’s count the ways.
Conflates sex with gender. You will be told emphatically in the first 10 minutes of your first gender studies class that gender and sex are two different things. As their ditty goes, sex is what’s between your legs and gender is what’s between your ears.
Birth certificate laws allow people to change their gender designation, but it’s the medical determination of the “what’s between the legs” not “what’s between the ears,” that’s recorded on a birth certificate. These birth certificate laws conflate sex and gender, something that would get you a big red X on your first gender studies test.
Denies gender is a spectrum. The second great commandment of gender studies 101 is that “gender is a spectrum.” But the three points New York City’s new law allows—male, female, and the nonbinary X—does not a spectrum make.
They are radically contrary to basic science. Gender theory is on an inevitable crash-course with the empiricism of biology. Place your bets on which will ultimately prevail.
The sex that gender theorists simplistically tell us is “between one’s legs” is found throughout our bodies, and intensely so. Our male and femaleness is imprinted in nearly every cell of our bodies. That’s a whole bunch of observable male or female coding, which is totally untouched by a simple change of clothing, hormones, surgery, or a new birth certificate.
Of course, male and femaleness determination is also found throughout every ounce of our blood as well as in the physicality of the brain. Just recently, university scientists found a way to determine the sex of ancient human skeletal remains by examining tooth enamel proteins. Our flippin’ teeth are marked male or female! And biology knows of no other sexes or genders. Sex is not what’s between your legs. It’s what your body is.
Looking at it another way, the religion and biology departments on the most respected university campuses have a closer connection, in methodologies and body of knowledge, than do gender studies and biology departments. Professor Allan Schore, a world-acclaimed neuro-biologist and neuro-endocrinologist at UCLA’s school of medicine, recently wrote unapologetically that “gender studies in developmental psychology remain[s] divorced from and [is] frequently antithetical to biology.” Let it be clear: these birth certificate laws side against what actually exists.
Thus, they are driven purely by fashionable dogma and the politics of personal destruction. Advocates would not only have us believe, but force us to accept, speak, and arrange our lives (under threat of personal abuse, shaming, and professional destruction) as if some recent scientific or medical discoveries have established that being trans or nonbinary is actually a thing.
There have been no such discoveries. It is mere ideology, dogma that exists only in the advocates’ beliefs about what reality should be. To go along with this is to be complicit in the illusion even though any refusal to do so gets you branded as the vilest kind of hater. And it doesn’t matter a wit how kind and winsome you are in disagreement. It’s a very knee-jerk and absolutist system they are running here.
This is why the push to be able to change one’s most fundamental legal document in this way is so politically important for the gender activists. If something that merely exists in the mind can be put into a legal document that follows you for life, it becomes “real.” It then gains the full power of law, becoming a more potent weapon to bludgeon all of us into affirming their delusion with our required use of names, pronouns, public actions, and workplace policies.
For responsible adults to play along with this illusion is, indeed, madness.