Portland, Oregon, is committing a fresh new cardinal sin: Misgendering transgender individuals after they are dead, on their death certificates. (I know you’re all simply aghast.) Leaving aside for a moment the fact that the individuals in question have shuffled off this mortal coil and are unlikely to be offended, “correcting” this situation is going to have pronounced impacts on recordkeeping in terms of monitoring both public health and crime statistics. But in the name of wokeness, at least “parts of Oregon” (as noted in the linked article) will change their coroner forms to reflect gender identity instead of (or possibly in addition to) the deceased’s actual sex. This move is only the latest in Portland’s growing history of woke initiatives to pacify the transgender community. (Oregon Live)
Portland area health officials are calling for change after finding that death certificates misgendered more than half of transgender or nonbinary people who died in the decade ending last year.
A combined research effort by Multnomah, Washington and Clackamas county epidemiologists, published Aug. 31 in the Journal of Public Health Management & Practice and made available to the public free of charge for two weeks starting Wednesday, found that nearly 30 Portlanders’ gender identities were erased after death because there is no system to ensure those identities are recorded when people die.
The accuracy of death records is important not only for individuals and families but because they are used for research and can affect how federal money is directed. While previous studies have shown transgender people are more likely to die by suicide and homicide, for example, the data is limited because neither Oregon nor the federal government have systems to track gender identity upon death.
Arguing about someone’s pronouns while they are still alive is one thing, but altering death records is clearly another. This isn’t a simple matter of what name or sexual identity is put on someone’s tombstone. (And the family generally controls that directly anyway.) Death records are compiled and used to determine trends and protect the public. Actual gender (as opposed to imagined gender) is a key factor when studying both severe health issues and crime statistics. Monitoring suicide rates is also something that healthcare agencies take very seriously and that’s even more important when you’re talking about the transgender community, where suicide rates are significantly higher than among the general population.
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Of course, what more did we expect from this particular state? Oregon is, after all, the place where in 2021, legislators passed into law a bill that mandated the placement of menstrual products in all K-12 school bathrooms, including those for boys. Per Portland’s public schools, starting this school year, “products will be available in all restrooms (male, female and all-gender) in every PPS building where education occurs… To ensure timely compliance, PPS ordered 500 dispensers. Dispensers have been installed in all elementary and middle school girls’ restrooms, and more will be installed in all remaining bathrooms, including boys’ restrooms, next year.”
A project of Oregon Reps. Janeen Sollman and Deb Patterson, this bill which apparently envisions 6-year-old girls who identify as boys getting their periods, also got a “yes” vote from Oregon’s Democratic gubernatorial nominee, Tina Kotek.
Meanwhile, the state’s most populous county, all the way back in 2019, banned the use of gender-specific pronouns. Everyone in Multnomah County, legally, was as of 2019 redesignated as a “they,” with “their” and “theirs” pronouns.
If a sufficient amount of taxpayer money could be procured, I find myself wondering if Portland or even all of Oregon might be able to hire a team of mediums to go around holding seances in all of the state’s graveyards. They could ask the spirits of the dead what their desired gender identity was when they were alive and begin modifying all of the tombstones accordingly. Perhaps they could take the funding for this out of the police budget. Don’t laugh too hard at that proposal, folks. This is Oregon we’re talking about. I probably shouldn’t be giving them ideas.
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