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European country makes gender change easy
Switzerland is set to allow people to self-declare their gender identity
with only a visit to the civil registry office
June 1, 2020. © Reuters /Denis Balibouse
From Saturday, people as young as 16 can legally change both their gender and name in Switzerland without needing to undergo hormone therapy or medical evaluations as the country brings in new rules to remove bureaucratic hurdles.
According to the changes to the Swiss civil code, people who are not under legal guardianship will be able to choose their gender and legal name by self-declaration at the civil registry office. Applicants under 16 years and those under adult protection will need the consent of their guardian.
The move marks a departure from the current system of following regionally prescribed standards in Switzerland, which usually made it a requirement for applicants to submit a certificate from a medical professional that attests to their transgender identity.
Some cantons – which are semi-autonomous member states in the country’s federal system – also require people to go through hormone treatment or anatomical transition before applying to legally change their gender. Meanwhile, a name change request needed to be accompanied by proof that the new name has already been unofficially in use for several years.
In October, the Swiss Federal Council – Switzerland’s government – had stamped its approval on the rule change. The Swiss parliament had adopted the amendment to the Swiss Civil Code and the amendment to the Civil Status Ordinance last December.
However, the new rules do not introduce a third gender option in Switzerland and will not affect family law relationships, such as marriage, registered partnerships, and parentage. The federal government is examining two parliamentary motions that seek to introduce a third gender and eliminate gender entries altogether.
Swiss law currently only recognizes the male and female genders and requires that a child’s gender be entered into the civil registry at birth. The Swiss Federal Civil Registry Office also bars parents from leaving their child’s gender entry open even if it cannot be clearly determined at birth.
With the new rules, Switzerland joins some two dozen countries worldwide aiming to give legal weight to gender self-identification without requiring medical procedures. Ireland, Belgium, Portugal, and Norway are the other European countries that have done so already.
Some other European nations, including Denmark, France, and Greece, have also done away with the need for medical procedures such as sex reassignment surgery, sterilization, or psychiatric evaluation. But there are additional conditions.
Unlike Sweden, I have always considered Switzerland to be an eminently sensible country, until now.
How the ‘Cancel Culture’ Mob’s Attempt to Silence
Jordan Peterson Backfired
Rex Murphy
December 14, 2021
Like many other pernicious practices, it comes out of the horrid womb of woke politics. Its mode of operation is simple and, alas, well known. When it was a mere toddler its operations were localized. Mainly it was kept behind the ivy-darkened walls of the modern university, nursed by all the laboured and ersatz “disciplines” of the various and hollow studies departments. It emerged from the fallow field of identity politics and found ready home in all the morbid “isms” of our time, and the shower of every multiplying “phobias.” I won’t list them. You know what they are, but all orbit around Planet Politically Correct, and all are empty.
The earliest demonstrations of the anti-intellectual cancel culture phenomenon usually revolved around bands of precious students ganging up to stop some speaker coming to a campus, under the ludicrous accusation that the particular speaker would “create an unsafe space.” That he or she would threaten to destabilize the hyper-ripe sensibilities of the various “marginalized” groups, force their “erasure” and buttress “hegemonic discourse and cis-heteronormative privilege,” this latter a piece of arcana known only to those who write and say such things. I have yet to meet a “cis-het” and it causes me no grief I have not.
It should be obvious that being a student at Yale or Harvard or Oxford, or others of near equal prestige, is to be among the most “privileged” and “entitled” young people in the world. The condemned speaker’s very presence on a campus was always characterized as threatening “harm,” or would make some “feel” uncomfortable or “trigger” traumas, or even expose “vulnerable students” to violence.
These claims might be appropriate for a threatened invasion, or some gang-swarm on a campus. But to haul them out as reasons to cancel a 20-minute talk from some mild (almost always) small-C conservative writer or commentator is pure garbage. To any adult such claims were screamingly obvious fictions, or if they were not fictions they were something even worse—willingly induced delusions. Mainly, however, cancellations and protests were just hard-left politics, an unsubtle and harsh reach to limit basic free speech, to muzzle any opinion their campus petty dictators didn’t wish aired, and more than a gesture to bring universities and their professors, by confected scandal and demonstrations, to the hard left’s grim and one-dimensional way of thinking.
Cancel culture has had an infection velocity any malign virus would envy. It has long since left the academy, found a great fortress within Twitter and online, and now patrols or attempts to patrol newspapers, television shows, Hollywood (which has supinely taken a knee to all its vacuous obsessions), and received warm welcome among corporations, Facebook, much of the professions, and even on a person-to-person level.
I’d like to do a full exposition of its imperial reach in this timid and regressive age, but instead I want to do a recount of one of its earlier and most famous episodes.
The Pronoun Wars
Once upon a time and in a place very near (from where I am bruising the laptop keyboard) in a province called Ontario and its oh-so-proudly tolerant and diverse city called Toronto, on the campus of its celebrated and eponymous University, there was a professor, a clinical psychologist. And his name was Jordan Peterson.
It was at the beginning of what history now calls the Pronoun Wars, denoted by one sage observer, and the greatest nightmare grammarians have ever endured, and sparked by the emergence of the “trans” movement. A concentrated account must suffice. Dr. Peterson, a near anonymous figure in those days, objected to the idea that he could be mandated to use any of the glittering array of new-fangled (and frankly ridiculous) bedspread of invented pronouns. It wasn’t that he would not, in some person-to-person contact, agree to use a new “pronoun” to a student who requested it. His objection came from deeper sources: that the concepts behind the practice emerged from a mode of politics he regarded as pernicious. He emphatically declared that as either professor or citizen he would never submit to “compelled speech.”
Skipping over much, a band of fevered students charged him with “transphobia”—not incidentally yet another term that has leaped into news and academic discourse, though you will not hear it much, even now, outside these progressive vaults. They interrupted Dr. Peterson’s lectures, assailed him with contempt and insult, harassed him when he attempted to argue his case, brought noise machines to drown him out, and asked—demanded—he be fired.
Now I must make a great jump, but as his story is well-known to many I think it permissible to do so.
The attempts to silence and ostracize Dr. Peterson failed in a divinely spectacular fashion. The woke, identity-politics mob—I’m going vernacular here—got its politically correct fat ass bitten as with the teeth of a monster crocodile. He ascended into fame with supersonic speed, wrote the book “12 Rules for Life” that sold millions, and became the most famous academic in the world—a heralded icon to masses of people grateful for his advice, his multitude of Biblical and other lectures, and his articulated defiance of the bullying tactics and ideology of left dogma.
They tried to smother Peterson, and even his own University of Toronto was complicit in the early effort. But to their woe and heartburn resentment, unwittingly fed him Grade A oxygen and launched him to undreamt of fame and access to a worldwide audience. They had attempted to crush a sparrow and lo, they set a dragon in flight against themselves.
Just over a couple of weeks ago, Dr. Peterson had something of a triumphal return to the United Kingdom, to the singularly prestigious universities of Cambridge and Oxford, where he gave lectures to crowded halls, spoke of their famous unions, and met and conversed with some of the world’s premier thinkers. And, most particularly the visit to Cambridge University was a conscious upending of his previous time there. He had been invited to stay awhile with the Divinity Department. Shamefully, like in Toronto previously, there was a demonstration, the usual dull, dumb, dastardly charges that he would make the students “unsafe” that he was toxic etc., etc., boringly etc.
On that occasion the university caved. Cancel culture made its inglorious demands and they caved.
But now here, three years after his campaign against woke culture in general and cancel culture in particular, awakened, or rather reawakened Cambridge to its academic conscience. It repented, its professors returned to the dignity of their calling and reinvited the noble Prof. Jordan Peterson, not least for leadership as a main campaigner for intellectual integrity, free speech, and his great labours as a winged dragon warring against the censors and bullies of political correctness and all the ilk thereof.
He returned in triumph to the very university that earlier feared to host him.
You may have read about his two-week tour of Cambridge and Oxford in American and UK newspapers, heard or seen news of it on various television programs in both countries. Curiously, two weeks of a Toronto professor, world-class speaker, million-seller author, given great welcome by two of the world’s highest and most historic academies, hardly stirred if it stirred at all the newsrooms of the city he calls home. Toronto is a very big city and a very small place.
Its currently most famous citizen and pre-eminent intellectual is celebrated almost everywhere but in the city of his home.
“A prophet is not…” You know the rest.
USA Swimming Official Resigns in Protest to Trans Athlete
Lia Thomas Competing Against Women
December 28, 2021
A longtime official for USA Swimming has stepped down and is urging other officials to do the same, arguing that despite Thomas’s preciousness to God, the athlete enjoys an unfair advantage over female competitors.
Thomas has made headlines recently after breaking a series of records at a college swimming meet, swimming for the UPenn women’s team and competing against female athletes.
Thomas, who transitioned last year, competed for three years on the men’s team. The athlete has undergone hormone suppression and is in compliance with NCAA bylaws, as Just the News reported.
“If Lia came on my deck as a referee, I would pull the coach aside and say, ‘Lia can swim, but Lia can swim exhibition or a time trial. Lia cannot compete against those women because that’s not fair,’” USA Swimming referee Cynthia Millen wrote in her resignation letter, which was published by Swimming World magazine.
“I told my fellow officials that I can no longer participate in a sport which allows biological men to compete against women,” she explained. “Everything fair about swimming is being destroyed.”
Swimming World’s editor-in-chief John Lohn has also previously penned a column calling for Thomas to be excluded from NCAA championships, citing an unfair competitive advantage.
For opponents of Thomas’ ability to compete against women, they argue that this is about fair competition and not bigotry against the athlete and their gender identity.
In an interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, Millen explained that she has anything but animosity for Thomas, but views the situation from a purely physical standpoint.
“I don’t mean to be critical of Lia — whatever’s going on, Lia’s a child of God, a precious person — but bodies swim against bodies,” she explained. “That’s a male body swimming against females. And that male body can never change. That male body will always be a male body.”
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