Monday, July 14, 2008

Sex Identification

One of the boxes that are on any company or government form when applying for anything is the boxes they use to identify one’s sex. Do you check the F or M box on forms? Why do you have to mark either one, when the government says that the company can’t discriminate?

i.e Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin

Just why does your boss really have to know what sex you ascribe to? I would like to know. Just why does the government need that box on your state’s driver’s license? My Military Identification Card doesn’t have that box on its card; why is it needed on other forms of identification? Is it to make sure that the company hires equal numbers of males and females, and couldn’t they determine that fact in the initial interview? The Social Security Administration knows the sex of each one of us, and their data is never changed, so why do we need to mark one of those boxes on the form we fill out. What will happen if we don’t mark it? I always thought it strange that while I was an Army First Sergeant, I was required to treat everyone the same, that on the front lines it didn’t matter what one’s ancestry was; but several government department required that we brake down all personnel accounting data according to race and sex when it came time to report the information to the appropriate government office.

Do the government bean counter hiding in their little cubicles, really need to know how many males or female a company hires. Is this why we are so stuck on classifying people according to a binary system identification of sex traits? Do we really need to have the sex identifier on our national ID card? We just can’t waltz into any government and ask for a new driver license to change our name, no! We must submit a document and have the legal system review the request and then have a judge sign the thing. How many times are we fingerprinted in our life, or do we require fingerprinting? Believe me; if I was ever arrested because the government thought I was someone else, I would be glad if they could do a fingerprint check to tell the government we are not the bad person they are looking for. But having us put our sex identifier on our national ID card; is that really necessary?

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