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"[A]ny male at any time will be permitted in girls? bathrooms, showers and change rooms as long as they have an ?innate feeling? of being female..."

That's what opponents say about Bill C-389 would amend the Canadian Human Rights Act to forbid discrimination on the basis of "gender identity" or "gender expression."

The bill probably won't pass, but here's a column favoring it. Excerpt:

Society takes for granted that there are two distinct sexes, with two corresponding ways of expressing gender identity. And we have concocted a range of stereotypes to reinforce the supposed chasms of difference between men and women, boys and girls.
Despite the fact that biologists such as Brown University professor Anne Fausto-Sterling have demonstrated that ?nature? itself yields not two distinct sexes but as many as five in a small but still significant number of cases, we still think male or female is something constant and unchanging. Sex is not only something viewed as uncomplicated and self-evident, but masculinity and femininity are tied to one?s birth-assigned sex.

Transsexual and transgendered individuals expose the shortcomings of our narrow categories. Because they trouble this vision of male and female, they have been ?socially erased,? to borrow a term from Concordia Professor Viviane Namaste...

As faculty members teaching in the sexual studies minor program at Carleton University, we are not surprised by the comments offered by Charles McVety, president of the Canada Christian College in Toronto in The Globe. [see blog post title, above.] Mr. McVety?s use of the language of pedophilia, and other forms of sexual predation, criminal opportunism and violence within female-specific spaces serves as a perfect example of the pathologization, criminalization and fear-mongering that continues to mark the lives of those within the trans communities.

Full post as published by Althouse on February 11, 2011 (boomark / email).