Ontario considers more changes to how gender is displayed on government ID - Polidicks

[QUOTE=Paramud;50885437]Not to mention height and weight, both of which are frequently lied about and can change on a day to day basis.[/QUOTE] Not even nessecarily lied about, even. Some people just plain remember their height and weight wrong.

[QUOTE=MaximLaHaxim;50885092][url]https://www.thestar.com/news/queenspark/2016/08/14/ontario-considers-more-changes-to-how-gender-is-displayed-on-government-id.html[/url] Sigh. This is really dumb.[/QUOTE] As the article says, this is in part to fix bureaucracy issues. For example, it's currently possible to legally change your gender to non-binary in (at least some of) the US, but the other systems in place mean that it can be extremely difficult or even impossible to be issued other identification documents in that case. [editline]14th August 2016[/editline] [QUOTE=Fangz;50885313]It could possibly cause issues with validity of the license in foreign countries. But it is more of a problem on the foreign countries end, and not Canada itself.[/QUOTE] I don't think it would cause significant issues, if the countries already recognise each others' ID cards. The main problem may be if officials there don't know about the change yet, but that's something that's relatively easy to fix.

I like how first people go with "Gender and sex are not the same thing" but now they are insisting that the sex means gender on IDs. [editline]14th August 2016[/editline] What a debacle.

[QUOTE=Combine 177;50885552]I like how first people go with "Gender and sex are not the same thing" but now they are insisting that the sex means gender on IDs. [editline]14th August 2016[/editline] What a debacle.[/QUOTE] Technically it's three distinct matters: 'biological sex', 'legal sex' and 'gender'. (The German language doesn't natively have a distinction between any of these, btw. I'm not sure if that makes it easier or more difficult to talk about it here though.) For most people these all match of course, but if you think about it it's not like there's any law of nature that says that this [I]has[/I] to be the case: - Biological sex is based on [I]a subset[/I] of information on how your body works. - Gender is based on a [I]different[/I] subset subset of that information. - Legal sex is based on [I]how you interact with society[/I] (and mostly only determines which pronouns or salutation the government uses when it writes you a letter at this point, since equal rights are a thing now). Biological sex and gender [I]both[/I] aren't exactly binary in the first place, and gender is generally a lot more visible than sex in day to day life. In that regard, it really does make a lot of sense to move legal sex away from a very strictly binary system and to align it with gender rather than biological sex, since the latter doesn't have nearly as many intersections with it as the former. [editline]15th August 2016[/editline] All that said, the use of listing legal sex on day-to-day identification documents is pretty debatable. It's not on mine, for example, and a quick search tells me it probably wasn't on there for Germans anywhere in the last century either. How it's normally listed (if it's listed) seems to differ in English-speaking countries: Sometimes it's 'sex', sometimes 'gender', depending on where the document was issued.

[QUOTE=srobins;50885184]What relevance is somebody's gender identity to the state? [B]The only reason a Sex/Gender field exists on an identification card in the first place is to help identify somebody and verify who they are. A big X completely invalidates the point of the field, it doesn't tell you anything useful about them and effectively makes it more difficult to identify somebody because you basically just wrote "whatever" on one of the fields. [/B]If you write "light skinned.. or black skinned.. or, I don't know, really pale? But sometimes black." in the "Race" field it would make it completely useless, no? Same here.[/QUOTE] If the person doesn't visually fit either F or M, or even looks like the opposite of the descriptor, as many choose to look like the gender they identify as, then isn't it more deceptive if they cannot change the descriptor?