"Measuring Gender" in the Health Care Bill Gail Heriot

 

Read the fine print on the health care bill.  Some of it is rather amusing ... at least I hope that's all it is ... an amusingly ill-phrased sentence.  On pages 410-411 of the 610-page Senate bill, the Secretary of Health and Human Services is directed to ensure that all federally-supported health care providers collect and report the patient's race, sex, etc.  For data collection purposes, the Secretary is directed to use the Office of Management and Budget standards for race.  But there are no similar standards for gender.  Given the number of cases that are truly hard to categorize is vanishingly small, until now, no one has thought such standards necessary.  Undaunted, the bill directs the Secretary "to develop standards for the measurement of gender." 

Huh?  The "measurement of gender"?  I thought it was much simpler than that.  Patients may be categorized as male or female, but we don't ordinarily think of gender as a continuous variable that can be "measured."  Is this a case of mind-bending political correctness?  Or  just sloppy draftsmanship?  (Either, of course, would be a bad sign for a bill that promises to alter our lives forever.)

Or maybe I'm just behind the times again.  A few months ago the San Diego Reader ran a cover story entitled, "My Gender Is Bunny."  I thought the title and cover art were pretty cute, so I picked up a copy.   But folks described in the the article were ... well ...significantly odd.  Here's a taste:

I’m ... talking to a man who, at taxpayer expense, takes hormones to become more like a woman yet is in the middle of an experimental performance in which he seeks to become a dragon.

Micha Cárdenas, the 31-year-old man/woman/ dragon in question, sits in a chair three feet from [me]. He’s facing me, but I can’t see his eyes due to the stereoscopic headset he’s wearing as part of a performance art project called Becoming Dragon. The headset limits Cárdenas’s view — except for peripheral vision — to the online world of Second Life, where he’s spent every waking moment of the past 11 days living as a dragon named Azdel Slade.

The room is in the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology building on the campus of the University of California, San Diego, where Cárdenas is a ... graduate student in the master of fine arts program .... Becoming Dragon is part of Cárdenas’s master of fine arts. For the performance, Cárdenas is spending more than 15 consecutive days living in Second Life. “My contract with myself was to be in Second Life for 365 hours [wearing the headset], except when I go to the bathroom.” ...

Coming in, I had expected to see someone more, well, drag queenish. Cárdenas doesn’t give off that vibe at all. He’s dressed in a black and gray leopard-print jacket .... Four-inch black piercings dangle from his ears. His arms are covered with tattoos .... He wears his hair in an androgynous style .... His posture, mannerisms, and speech are neither overtly feminine nor masculine. And that’s the way Cárdenas sees himself, somewhere in between. Asked whether his dragon “avatar,” ... is male or female, Cárdenas answers, “Neither. Both. Neither and both, just like in real life.”

Asked if he identifies himself as gay, he says, “No, I identify as queer, which ... means that I don’t identify as gay because that would mean I’m a man who likes men, or as a lesbian, which would mean that I’m a woman who likes women, but as queer: I am just attracted to who I’m attracted to....”

...

Though the idea of species change sounds absolutely loco to just about everybody, Cárdenas in his travels in Second Life has found a community of people who long to change their species from human to some kind of animal, real or imagined. “I’ve discovered as part of this performance that there are a lot of people who have sex and have relationships and get married as dragons and bunnies and other species. The most common thing is hybrid species. Right now, I’m a dragon. But there’s also another avatar I use which is this thing called a Neko, which is a half-cat, half-human kind of person. Nekos that are half-human, half-animal are really common in Second Life. Something that’s happened in the last few days [during the performance] is I’ve met a bunch of people who call themselves Otherkin, and they have this whole community who feel really deeply, painfully, truly that they are some other species. This couple that talked to me was a dragon-man and a fox-woman. They both said, very seriously, that if they could get species-change surgery, they would do it in a second.”

Did you catch the part about Mr. Cardenas' adventures being a taxpayer expense?  Me too. Sigh.  UCSD is a public university in the midst of horrific budget cuts and likely layoffs.  Maybe Mr. Cardenas' program will be terminated.  I wonder how the Secretary of Health and Human Services will "measure" his gender.

Comments

[dearieme]

The major distinctions are presumably Male/Female/Oh poor you. There are doubtless finer distinctions in the OPY category. BLTs and that sort of thing.

[dearieme]

On reflection, I withdraw the word "thing".

[krome]

Measurement of gender?

Uh, did you mean the 7 inches?

[Lou ots]

Come on, how about some compassion for the Oh Poor You category.

They plain truth is that wherever the state takes notice of human catgories, it created a property in identity which must be measured if it is to be regulated. If you will have Nuremburg laws, you must have Rassenwissenschaft.

Now near and dear to the hearts of the misfits and perverts is the false doctrine that gender identity is a social construct susceptible to political manipulation. While the "measuring Gender" parts of the bill in question may be an inappropriate obsequy to the pervert lobby, It is jut as likely to be nothing more nor less than the nomal bureaucratic response to ambiguity.

It is quite true that there are small number of genetic sports whose gender is truly indeterminate, sometimes to the extent of dimorphic hermaphroditism. Commonly these unfortunates are assigned by parents and doctors to one gender or another, frequently with what is thought at the time to be corrective surgery. Why would drafters of governmental interference with private affairs not involve themseles with such questions?
I am sure questions of hermaphroditism have come up before in connection with family law, and with estats and trusts, and we could look stuff like that up.

[JJ]

I actually used to be good friends with Cardenas when I lived in SD. He is extremely intelligent in both a practical and academic sense. I have read this article and I think agree it is a little strange, but give the guy a break. It is art.