What is sex?
This is the question boggling the Administration's Bureau of Prisons recently, but it's a question that confronts many organizations when faced with the growing visibility of transgender employees, clients, students, guests and vendors.
If you think it's "chromosomes," that's an old and overly simplified explanation that no longer holds much scientific credibility. The Administration has announced that transgender prisoners are now going to be housed according to their "biological sex."
That assumes there's a single "biological" marker that unambiguously defines one's sex, although it's scientifically clear that there isn't.
The Administration has rescinded the Bureau of Prisons' prior policy regarding transgender prisoners, but won't say whether the new policy complies with PREA, the prisoner safety legislation, or how they'll define "biological sex."
ACLU attorney Chase Strangio, who represents transgender prisoners, told BuzzFeed News that “creating an entire policy around the concept of ‘biological sex’ but not including a definition of the term ... serves the misleading and false suggestion that one’s ‘biological sex’ is somehow self-evident.” Instead, he said, the new policy lets Bureau of Prison officials use their “discretion to exclude transgender individuals from safer placements.”
If you're interested in more research on this subject of defining sex, here are a couple of links: https://ift.tt/2Kvs36a; https://ift.tt/2rR65CK; https://goo.gl/Q1n1k9;
Original link: https://ift.tt/2Gs67WV
