Freedom of Choice?

I don’t know if everyone already saw this article, or if it’s already been thoroughly blogged about (I only read a select few blogs), so if this is repetitive, I apologize.

Yesterday, the NY Times reported that "New York Plans to Make Gender Personal Choice." I found this article so preposterous that it would almost be funny—if not for the fact that it is real. Instead, I would have to describe it as extremely scary.

Basically, the city’s Board of Health is considering implementing a rule that states that a person may change the gender documented on his/her/its birth certificate if he/she/it has statements from a doctor and a mental health professional supporting a gender switch. The person will have to have lived in the proposed gender for two years, but the rule gives no specific medical requirements. In other words, you would be able to change the sex on your birth certificate even if you still had all the biological traits of your birth gender!

According to the NY Times:
“The change would lead to many intriguing questions: For example, would a man who becomes a woman be able to marry another man? (Probably.) Would an adoption agency be able to uncover the original sex of a proposed parent? (Not without a court order.) Would a woman who becomes a man be able to fight in combat, or play in the National Football League? (These areas have yet to be explored.)”

Is anyone else baffled by the idea of a “freedom to choose” your gender??? This brings a whole new meaning to the phrase “pro-choice.” It just shows how the concept of individual rights, if given no boundaries, can be taken to frightening extremes. Since when is it a basic human right to select one’s gender?

I am appalled by the depths to which our culture has sunk even to be taking such a thing seriously. Not only are we prepared to allow people to live their lives as a member of a different gender than the one in which God created them, but we are actually prepared to totally eliminate all trace of the fact that God “chose” a different sex for them than they did. Frankly, the whole thing seems slightly delusional. Secular people will label religious believers as closed-minded and willfully self-deceptive for attempting to reconcile science with religious dogma, yet some of the same people are prepared to accept this total denial of biological reality. It just doesn’t make sense to me.

“Joann Prinzivalli, 52, a lawyer for the New York Transgender Rights Organization, a man who has lived as a woman since 2000, without surgery, said, ‘It’s based on an arbitrary distinction that says there are two and only two sexes. In reality the diversity of nature is such that there are more than just two, and people who seem to belong to one of the designated sexes may really belong to the other.”

Really? That's news to me!
I’m sorry, but this seems simply bizarre!