New Oklahoma anti-drag bill would seemingly ban Mimi Bobeck of the Drew Carey show

Apparently North Dakota is trying hard to win the game of “most outrageous anti-trans bullshit bill”.

N. Dakota bill would bar people from using pronouns according to gender identity; $1,500 fines threatened (yahoo.com)

Republican lawmakers in North Dakota have introduced legislation seeking to prohibit transgender and nonbinary people from using pronouns according to their gender identity.

Or rather, prohibit anyone from affirming another person’s non-assigned gender in communication to third parties.

Senate Bill 1299 states that “words referring to an individual, person, employer, employee, contestant, participant, member, student, or juvenile must be used in the context of that person’s sex as determined at birth.

“Any person [who] violates this section must be assessed a fee of one thousand five hundred dollars,” the bill adds.

Gee, that sounds extremely First Amendment compliant.

If the person’s gender identity or expression is contested, that determination should be established by the “individual’s deoxyribonucleic acid,” or DNA, the legislation states.

Big cargo cult science words here. I bet none of the bill’s backers could explain how exactly that’d work medically and procedurally. Also apparently, the USA has such half-assed civil administration that it’s not possible to reasonably prove via paperwork what your assigned gender literally was.

Speaking in defense of the bill on Wednesday, state Sen. David Clemens said if a person’s gender is ever challenged, the responsibility to prove their gender will fall on that individual.

So if for example some online “transvestigators” or leftist gender activists decide that Sen. David Clemens was assigned female at birth, then what? They could report someone else for gendering Clemens incorrectly as male, and then (assuming that the other person contests the fine) Clemens would be court ordered to submit a DNA sample for testing? And perhaps pay for some expenses? Just so that the state could eventually fine one person or another, whoever turns out to have been incorrect?

Mind you, there’s some chance that a person’s karyotypic or genetic sex could turn out different from their literal assigned gender. If that happened to Clemens, then under the proposed law everyone in North Dakota would be legally required to refer to her as female for the rest of her life, even if she was technically assigned male at birth.

“Say, they’re a boy, but they come to school and say they’re a girl. As far as that school is concerned in this bill, that person is still a boy,” Clemens, one of the authors of the legislation, said Wednesday when speaking in favor of the bill.

“If it becomes contested, the burden will be on the girl, the so-called girl, or the boy, to prove that he is a girl,” he added, according to local station KYFR-TV.

Here, in this example, Clemens is sneakily framing the bill as if it’d only concern how school officials recognize the gender of their students.

Now, there’s apparently some chance that families might try to pass off trans teens as cis at a new school. Obviously, under the proposed law, schools would have a legal ass-covering interest in trying to confirm all new students’ assigned gender, specifically as defined by the proposed law. Could you demand testing of an assumed-cis person without technically alleging that the person is trans (so you don’t have to pay the fine if it turns out that the person is indeed cis)?

Potentially, just about all young ND residents could end up being subjected to DNA testing, and a good handful of them could turn out to be legally (under the proposed law) different sex than what they were technically assigned at birth.

The proposed bill was put forth to the state Senate’s Judiciary Committee this week.

Clemens, who was the only person to give testimony in favor of the legislation, was at times “at a loss for words,” according to trans rights advocate Erin Reed, who live-tweeted the hearing.

This bill was clearly thought out very poorly, and probably by someone else than Clemens at that.

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted unanimously to give this bill a “do not pass” recommendation.

North Dakota Sen. Ryan Braunberger, a freshman Democrat, celebrated the committee’s recommendation on Twitter, calling it a “positive step in protecting transgender ND.”

However, according to Reed the bill can still move forward, “as committees don’t have veto power there, and the chair indicated more bills are coming.”

There’s always more bills coming. Always well-paid, dedicated professionals patiently feeding more spaghetti in the spaghetti-throwing machine.

They say that having a story line in a school book with gay parents is “grooming” because it’s introducing “sexuality”. So if they ban books with gay parents they will have to do the same with hetero parents too. That means no mention at all of families. They also say a teacher can’t mention a spouse if the spouse is same-sex because that’s also “grooming” so it would logically follow that a hetero teacher can’t mention a spouse either. Same with students mentioning their parents. Basically no hint of a having a family at all will have to be the default all because these “family values” right wing nuts hate life and the universe.

How awkward everything is going to become.

lumipuna
Those “overly broad laws” may well be an inevitable result of the general ‘law and order’ distinction. I’m now looking at these issues from the perspective of
– Law being the careful consideration of the rights, property and similar issues of the gentry or other propertied groups.

– Order is for controlling the rest of the hoi polloi , peasants servants employees and tenants of various kinds. In many places there’s a thin veneer of cosmetic ‘law’ covering Order enforcement behaviours by police or justice authorities. But far too many jurisdictions just don’t care.

I think I first read this in an issue of The Atlantic or the New Yorker. Probably a book review.

Fascinating:

https://www.sciencealert.com/the-most-common-pain-relief-drug-in-the-world-induces-risky-behavior-study-shows

A growing body of research suggesting that acetaminophen’s (Tylenol’s) effects on pain reduction also extend to various psychological processes, lowering people’s receptivity to hurt feelings, experiencing reduced empathy, and even blunting cognitive functions. And leading to increased acceptance of risky activity.

This leads to an insight about psychopaths. The impulsivity and seeming fearlessness may stem from their diminished empathy, via diminished empathy for their own possible future selves. The one lying (or even dying) in pain, or coughing out his last in some hospital after contracting HIV during risky sex, or rotting in prison after committing a brazen crime and getting caught. Less empathy with these possible future selves could translate into increased risk tolerance and, thus impulsivity in the presence. If so, the psychopath’s impulsitivy is actually a side effect of their noted deficiency of empathy.

Also: we’ve found a pharmaceutical knob for controlling one of the dark triad traits. Unfortunately, it’s already widely available OTC and it turns that trait up. But this implies the existence of some cheap, low-side-effect-profile mechanism for turning it down, even if we have not identified it yet.

(There are anecdotal suggestions that psychedelics may dial down a different one, narcissism.)

@Lumipuna: I’m sure lots of people would chip in to raise $1500 to make the governor take a DNA test. Heck, let’s require the entire ND legislature to take these tests to show how much they believe, or at least the ones that vote for it.

An unknown amount of people who are assigned one sex or the other at birth turn out to have chromosomes that don’t agree with that assignment, nor with whether they think of themselves as firmly male or female.

Might catch out a few right-wingers that way, say women with androgen insensitivity (which they don’t like anyway, since they can’t breed). What about extra or missing sex chromosomes?

The rabid transphobes are going to come up against the “no one gets to know muh DNA!” crowd, even though they probably overlap a lot.

@Ooglyboggles:
Congratulations re both the diploma & the new job.

Hello.

> Ooglyboggles
Congratulations ! Good luck at your job.

Have a nice day.

@Ooglyboggles
Congrats!

@Ooglyboggles

Congrats!

@Surplus

The fact that Tylenol is also analgesic suggests things are more complicated. A drug that does the opposite might also increase pain perception, possibly leading to induced fibromyalgia. Or not. Contrary to the beliefs of neuro-nihilist bros, the brain actually has a lot of dials, and they are all kludgily interlinked – see for instance the myriad IRL effects of dopamine and oxytocin vs. the ones pop culture fixates on.

Realistically though I think the more likely outcome is the US military developing drugs that turn soldiers into (near) sociopaths. This isn’t a good idea at all, but well… That has rarely stopped the US govt. See also: everything from MKULTRA to modern special forces guys being basically trained as terrorists, and joining neo-Nazi groups when they come back from overseas. And it’s not like we’ve never gotten soldiers hooked on empathy-killing drugs, James Tiptree Jr. was writing about this shit back in the 60s.

As for sociopaths having less empathy for their possible future selves, yes, that’s been known for a while. And is more or less intuitive for those of us who’ve lived with people on that spectrum.

@Ooglyboggles: Congratulations!

@Cyborgette:

See also: everything from MKULTRA to modern special forces guys being basically trained as terrorists, and joining neo-Nazi groups when they come back from overseas. And it’s not like we’ve never gotten soldiers hooked on empathy-killing drugs, James Tiptree Jr. was writing about this shit back in the 60s.

And considering that James Tiptree Jr. worked as an Army intelligence officer under her real name of Alice Bradley during WWII, and then later as Alice Sheldon worked for the CIA for a few years in the 50s, she probably knew more of what she was talking about than most people might have suspected at the time.

(Which is a good chunk of why people didn’t suspect that James Tiptree Jr. was a woman for the first decade of a two decade writing career. The writer was so obviously somebody who knew how the military worked.)

Her husband was also an officer in the CIA. He became a department head. I think that’s how they met.