why gender on licenses?

[matildalucet]

Just renewed my driver's license online. (Woohoo! No line!) Which got me curious about why genders still appear on that document nowadays, other than because we have always done it. A quick google gave me a lot of links for how to change it, but none on the rationale. Could just be me being hasty in my search, or it could be an obscure question.

Comments

[excentric397]

Never thought about it before. Especially today, when so many transgender people are coming out, it just seems another way to discriminate and label. After spending so much time on Tumblr, and seeing all the micro-labeling people are doing to themselves and others, and using it to promote more hate and discrimination and 'you can't call yourself by the label I call myself because blah, blah, blah', I find it disturbing. I don't really understand the need to put everyone in categories. Enlightenment comes very, very slowly for some, and not at all for others.

[pryder]

The trouble is that there is NOT a simple procedure for updating the database to conform to reality. Changing your legal gender is expensive. First you have to be blessed by a medical professional, usually somebody in psych that your medical insurance won't pay for. (Medical insurance usually has rather limited provisions for psych care and insurers often do not have any gender specialists in their networks.) Then you have to file papers with your state for the name change, typically including a requirement that you pay to publish a public notice of the change in some obscure section of some newspaper that nobody will read. Only then can you apply to the motor vehicle people and pay yet another fee, and repeat that process for various other bureaucracies.

And let's not forget that in some jurisdictions, you will have to have gender surgery before the authorities will let you make the change. Massachusetts, mercifully, is not one of them.