Idaho’s bill defining biological sex isn’t about facts. It’s about power and bigotry | Opinion
Today, Idaho lawmakers plan to debate a bill that claims not to do much.
Rep. Julianne Young, R-Blackfoot, the self-proclaimed “word girl” and “English nerd” who sponsored House Bill 421 claims its only intent is to have clear definitions of terms like “sex,” “man” and “woman” in law. It also defines gender as a synonym for sex, a legal attempt to define trans people out of existence.
“Having clear definitions is critical to our ability to both communicate and to craft policy,” she told the House State Affairs Committee.
This ruse is well-trodden ground for Young, who in 2020 sponsored House Bill 509, an unconstitutional bill (which cost taxpayers well over $300,000) designed to prevent transgender people from getting identifying documents that list their identified gender, as a wonky effort to defend “the value of accurate vital records.”
What a coincidence that every time Young feels nerdy it’s time for the LGBTQ+ community to lose rights.
H421 declares that biological females produce eggs and males produce sperm, absent “a developmental or genetic anomaly or historical accident.” This is similar to how Young defined sex in the debate about H509. “The presence of a Y in the chromosome results in maleness. The absence of a Y results in femaleness,” she said then.
All so simple, so scientific.
“I feel like this is coming straight from science class,” said Rep. Heather Scott, R-Blanchard.
“I like the approach of science. There’s X,X and X,Y chromosomes,” said Rep. Bruce Skaug, R-Nampa.
But this pure fantasy dressed up as serious realism. Biological sex is very complicated.
For example, what about a person who was born with typically female sexual organs, and who has an X and a Y chromosome?
This happens, and it’s not extremely rare. A 2016 study in Denmark concluded that between 6 and 7 of every 100,000 women have an X,Y genotype. So you’d expect that about 50 or 60 women in Idaho have a Y chromosome.
Is the genetic anomaly here that a female has a Y chromosome or that a male has female sexual organs? Is this person legally male or female under Young’s proposed law?
It gets more complicated. While many X,Y females don’t develop functional ovaries, some can get pregnant and give birth. So, under the definitions contained in the bill, either some men give birth or some women have male genes.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
In all, somewhere around 1.7% of people are intersex, neither strictly biologically male nor female, according to the most commonly cited estimates. As intersex Idahoan Sydney Madsen told the committee, this is similar to the prevalence of green eyes. This would imply Young’s bill defines out of existence about 34,000 Idahoans.
These two things are clear.
The bill’s assertions that “every individual is either male or female” and “there are two, and only two, sexes” are made-up nonsense. There are likely tens of thousands of Idahoans whose existence is proof that they are false.
Biological sex is not simple — and it’s far too complicated for people as inexpert as senators and representatives to presume they can write a law and end the matter.
But, of course, this isn’t about facts. It’s about the exercise of power. Bills like the ones Young regularly sponsors have as much to do with the facts of sex and gender as Jim Crow laws had to do with the facts of race.
Young said she worked on the bill with the Alliance Defending Freedom, a designated hate group that seems more every day like Idaho’s unelected shadow government: writing many of our laws and arguing our cases in court.
Support for discrimination is not motivated by an effort to be clear in definitions or to communicate clearly or to set “biological truth” in stone.
It is motivated by bigotry.
Nikson Mathews, a transgender man who testified against the bill, told the committee: “For you, these might be words, but for us, this is our identity. … It sends a clear message to thousands of trans, nonbinary and intersex Idahoans that we are nothing.”
That’s the point.
“Every time a bill on this topic has come up over the last few years, I see in sessions increased levels of depression, increased levels of anxiety, increased levels of suicidality and feelings of despair…,” Rachel Bazzett, a licensed mental health practitioner who commonly treats LGBTQ+ people, testified.
What’s happening in the Capitol is nothing different from a bunch of children ganging up to bully a gay kid in school, with all the same effects.
The deficiency in lawmakers supporting this and similar bills is not intellectual.
It’s moral.
Bryan Clark is an opinion writer for the Idaho Statesman.
