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When, in mid-October, MPs from the broad left-wing bloc Nouveau Front Populaire tabled a proposal in the French Parliament to remove sex from national identity cards, they prefaced it with an explanation: having one’s sex recorded on identity documents, they claimed, is bad for equality, bad for women, and especially bad for those who identify as transgender. “It is common for an individual’s appearance not to correspond to the stereotypes associated with the sex recorded on their official papers,” they argued, followed by a non sequitur of the highest order: that sex itself is an outdated stereotype.
Feminist discussion groups exploded. One woman asked, “What happened to the French? Have they gone mad?” Truth be told, the same question could be asked of many nations today: have the Irish, Portuguese, Belgians, Germans and others gone mad? And if they have not, what explains why legislators across so many states are suddenly deciding that biological sex — not only a basic fact of human reproduction but a cornerstone of equality and non-discrimination law — is a relic of the past to be discarded like phrenology or geocentrism?
Only a few weeks ago, Michael O’Flaherty, the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, made claims strikingly similar to those of the French politicians in a letter to the UK Parliament. O’Flaherty, who previously headed the EU Fundamental Rights Agency for ten years before assuming his current post, insists that the recent UK Supreme Court ruling may not only fall outside European law but will also cause terrible harm to those identifying as transgender. The ruling clarified that, under UK equality law, the words “women” and “men” must be understood in their ordinary meaning: females and males. O’Flaherty’s position stems from his long-standing advocacy to eliminate sex from law and practice, which culminated in his drafting of the Yogyakarta Principles in 2007, later updated in 2017 with a clear demand: that states must cease registering sex on all legal documents, including birth certificates.
The question now is not whether Europe can afford to tell the truth about sex, but whether it can afford not to.
Source: Europe must not erase sex | Faika El-Nagashi and Anna Zobnina | The Critic Magazine