Gender Inflation

Bonfire of the Vanities

Over the past few months the West has reached a new waypoint of absurdity in its acceptance of the notion that one's gender is a bender.  It has turned out that one's gender is whatever one identifies it as being.  Facebook, ever on the cutting edge of nihilism and narcissism, thoughtfully listed around thirty-five gender options for "clients" to choose as part of the lemming rush-to-the-cliff of gender identity.  But time and tide wait for no man, so now, in the latest iteration, Facebook in the UK has expanded the list of potential gender identities to seventy.  If you thought that 35 gender self-identities was an inflation to the nonsensical, what does a doubling indicate?

For our part, we are only just able to get up off the floor from rolling around laughing.  But we have not yet reached the limits of hilarity on this one.  Because the West is also insisting upon sexual and gender licentiousness as an absolute and irrevocable human right, it finds itself in a pickle.  Institutions of all kinds will have to change.  Take the humble prison.  Here the state is displayed in all its fearsome might.  But every prisoner must be treated with dignity, which of course means that each prisoner's gender identity must be reflected appropriately.  This from Stuff:

A transgender prisoner with a taste for arson is taking legal action against the Corrections Department to get access to hormone treatment.  Brendon Forrest, who identifies as a woman, has taken a case to the Human Rights Review Tribunal after being denied expensive medical treatment in prison.  After a policy change last year, transgender inmates can request a transfer to a different prison matching the sex they identify with, instead of that on their birth certificate.  Factors to be considered include any risk the prisoner may pose to the safety of other prisoners, and vice-versa. . . . Forrest's case has been sent back to the Human Rights Commission for a secret mediation process, which is still rolling on.

Now, NZ Corrections and the Human Rights Review Tribual are lost way back in the Dark Ages of gender persecution and discrimination.  They need to move with the times.  There are now seventy genders people may self-identify with, so instead of the antediluvian binary male-female gender ignorance, we will now need around 70 different prisons to accommodate the wondrous variety of genders that folk now have an absolute non-discrimination right to identify with and as.  The Human Rights Commission will need to stand up and defend the rights of each gender.  And they had better get a hurry-up, because Facebook's original gender options have doubled in about three months to 70 possible gender identities.  By the time the Corrections and Department and the Human Rights Commission decide Brendan Forrest's case, we predict it will have doubled again to 140 possibilities.

Now here is the quandary which all Unbelievers face: by what standard--ethical, moral, philosophical, or religious--are you going to withstand this demand for human rights?  They have no standard.  So the best they can do is preserve the "institutionalised discrimination" by kicking for touch.  Here is liberal blogger, David Farrar putting his best foot forward:  he agrees with the founder of the Sensible Sentencing Trust who said:

Sensible Sentencing Trust founder Garth McVicar described the situation as "nuttiness". "If he wants to sort himself out, or find out what gender he is that's fine, but let it be on the outside. It shouldn't be on the taxpayer. That's what happens with these bush lawyers, they play merry hell with the system."

Farrar says:

I agree. Forrest has a record of arson, threatening and setting a car alight with a person in it. If he stops committing crimes, then he’ll be out of prison and free to pursue treatment he desires.

Ah, but in the meantime his fundamental human rights must needs be violated and he be subject to official, institutional discrimination--in the prisons.  It's not that the whole matter of gender identification is wrong or idiotic per se (for Farrar has not basis or standard by which to argue that) but that it ought not to be recognised on the government's patch.

What an asinine mess of their own making.