Texas sized Fail.

I've written before about gender identity issues and it's something I'm learning more about and, as I do so, realizing how little is known about it. While people are at least fairly comfortable acknowledging that there are gay and lesbians (insofar as "they exist"), there tends to be an awkward and embarrassing silence about gender issues.

When people hear the word "transgender" they immediately think "cross dresser" or "drag queen" or "gay"...none of which is the same. I'm going to avoid defining all those terms for the moment because it's much easier to just move onto the "work around".

I wrote previously about the first time I'd dealt with transgenderism on a personal level, having a friend tell me she was a transgendered woman. Simply put, the "work around" is just to accept people at their word--if s/he says that s/he's a man or woman, accept it and move on. That person knows their gender far more than you could by looking at them.

That's why articles like this one upset me so. Not only do the legislators know very little about transgenderism, but they also recognize that the law they are writing is damaging to its own citizens. When presented with the fact that people are born with multiple sex organs and are often simply mis-labeled as one or the other, only to determine later in life that they are NOT the gender assigned at birth, the evidence is dismissed and ignored. "Sure," they seem to be saying, "this law will hurt people and goes against evidence--but we think that your reality is damaging to how I want to see the world."

It basically boils down to that. The Texas legislature is determining, against scientific fact and evidence, that gender is determined at birth based upon the word of the doctor who births you, and that is that. I am hoping to move to Austin when I get out of the Army, but the more I read about things like this, the more it makes me think I should simply move somewhere where I won't be constantly pissed off that the political leadership is so intent on demonizing its own citizenry.