Right Reacts to MA Giving Gender Choice on Driver's Licenses

Transsexual residents of Massachusetts will be allowed to specify the gender with which they identify on their driver's licenses without providing proof of surgical sex reassignment, a development that the right wing has denounced.

A Jan. 31 item posted at right-wing Web site WorldNetDaily noted that, "The state of Massachusetts... has been at the forefront of normalizing homosexual relationships in law," and posted an image of a letter, dated Jan. 21 and addressed to Marc Solomon of the GLBT equality group MassEquality, and signed by the Registrar of Motor Vehicles, Rachel Kaprielian.

In the letter, Kaprielian noted that "medical proof of sex reassignment surgery.... is often very difficult, if not impossible, for many individuals to satisfy," and added that "the Registry of Motor Vehicles will no longer require an individual to provide an amended birth certificate in support of the new gender" identification of driver's license applicants.

Rather, "an individual who wishes to change the gender marker will submit an updated application together with a Gender Designation Change Form, signed by him or her and a medical provider attesting to the gender that the individual considers himself or herself to be."

The article reported that anti-gay organization MassResistance.com, which has opposed marriage equality, raised the specter of men using women's restrooms.

Stated MassResistance.com, "Essentially, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has decided that for legal purposes of identification, a person's actual sex is meaningless.

"The gender 'you consider yourself to be' is now officially used.

"This is madness," MassResistance declared.

"But it's now the state policy."

The anti-gay group envisioned a situation in which "A man using a women's restroom or women's locker room would now show police a legal, official Massachusetts identification that he 'is a woman.'

"He could get this on the basis of 'the gender he considers himself to be' with the agreement of a 'medical provider,'" the organization said on its website.

The group extended the scenario to school restrooms, imagining that, "A male elementary school teacher can start coming to school wearing women's clothes and using the girls' rest rooms or locker rooms.

"And this will extend everywhere throughout society, in businesses, public accommodations, schools, and everywhere else."

Catholic Website Les Femmes blasted the new policy, declaring in a Jan. 29 posting that allowing transgendered individuals to attest to their own gender constituted Orwellian "newspeak," and declaring, "Many people today are lost in a virtual world that has little to do with reality even when it's described as 'virtual reality.

"Instead, people play let's pretend choosing whatever happens to make them feel good at the moment no matter how idiotic."

Railed the posting, "Homosexuals are particularly prone to this as they play wedding and house together and pretend to make babies together which is physically impossible."

Les Femmes went on, "It's bad enough when idividuals [sic] do this, but when the government starts playing the game as well, the people are literally living in the STATE of insanity."

The posting continued, "Consider that identification papers like the driver's license is a legal document.

"When your child's male teacher comes to school dressed as a woman, will you have any legal right to protest since the state recognizes his right to choose his own gender?

"When he uses the female restroom, ditto.

"Those who object will be considered the bigots; we know the drill by now," the Les Femmes item continued.