🦌 Getting upset with people willfully misunderstanding the very short and straightforward anti-trans bill making it a felony to knowingly tell (or give the misleading impression to) the Texas government or an employer, in a written or verbal statement, that someone is "the opposite" biological sex from the one they were assigned at birth. ("sex: X" exempt, I guess?)
Some people are pretending this is about gender presentation or adhering to gender roles, when it has absolutely nothing to do with that by any stretch of the imagination.
It is entirely about making false (or misleading) statements about someone's biological sex, and explicitly defining sex assigned at birth as the standard of truth for that. Which means it applies to basically all identification documents of legal relevance to the government or employers. "Misleading" is presumably intended to cover, e.g., saying I'm a woman without disclaiming that I'm a biological male who merely identifies as a woman.
It's called "gender identity fraud" because the logic is that trans people are using "gender identity" as an excuse to lie about our sex. It's not fraud about your gender identity, it's that your gender identity is fraud.
Notice how it's built in the negative space of mainstream, cis-friendly, thought-terminating trans talking points? Everyone who played the "sex and gender are different" game built the mold that they poured their metal into to cast this.
Anyway, the basic opposing positions that are possible are:
I'm not lying by claiming my sex (not gender) is female (such as by showing my ID), that's factually true, and it's perverse to punish people for truthful statements*It's false to say my sex is female, but trans people should be allowed to lie about what we are because being honest about it makes us sad and that's not niceIt's false to say my sex is female, and that's not cool, but making it a felony is excessive (and maybe shouldn't even be a misdemeanor because it's not the government's business to punish every lie)People should be clear with themselves about which of those positions they hold, and own that and all the implications that follow from it.
You're welcome for spending 3 hours editing this down from our original outrage.
Bill here if you want to follow it: https://capitol.texas.gov/BillLookup/Text.aspx?LegSess=89R&Bill=HB3817
* Let me tell you a secret: No cis person has any evidence whatsoever to back up their claim that they're the gender or sex they say they are. They only have their assertion of identity. The only reason anyone believes otherwise is that they agree with TERFs about the whole big gamete babby-maker vs. small gamete bepis-haver thing. Self-definition is the only legitimate basis of truth for this, and anything else makes trans people fake. All taxonomies are socially constructed, so this is not a dispute over empirical facts, it's a dispute over ideology: the ideology of self-definition vs. the ideology of the cis binary, which assert entirely different bases of truth on this question.
Fiadh (aglæcmæġden)
