A shortlist of reasons it’s a bad idea to rely on birth certificates to “verify gender”

• Not everyone has a birth certificate
• Asking people to pay a significant amount of money to be accepted excludes working class folk.
• Not everyone is born in the uk.
• People not born in the UK might not be from countries that issue an equivilent document.
• People not born in the UK might come from states that don’t exist any more.
• Or states that are actively trying to kill them.
• Or just states that don’t want to help people do the thing you’re policing.
• Or states that just lost all their records.
• Or states that have no gender recognition process.
• Some peoples parents didn’t register them with the state.
• Maybe because the state is authoritarian and polices based on children.
• Or the parents are just scared.
• Or poor.
• Or from an oppressed minority which the state doesn’t recognise.
• Different countries hold people to different standards for evidence- your weird policing of gender is based on categories that vary randomly based on where someone was born.
• Some folks are estranged from their parents, making it harder to get certificates.
• Nonbinary people exist, and many nations don’t realise that.
• Intersex people exist, and birth certificates for intersex people are a quagmire you don’t want to get into, and it’s a different one for every country on the planet.
• States generally hate leftists, queers, people of colour, etc, and relying on the state reproduces those oppressions.
• A person can experience more than one of these at once.
• You probably don’t need to “verify gender”, most men don’t find women’s services helpful, and if your women’s space doesn’t have a “no creeps” rule then you’ve probably got bigger problems.

TL;DR: No, really, men don’t need all women’s shortlists to get elected. If they did, we wouldn’t need all women’s shortlists. Any man pretending to be a woman to get on an all womens shortlist is certainly going to have a harder time getting elected than just…running as a man.

Can we argue about something important now, like how it takes three years to get humiliating treatment on the NHS, resulting in mass suicides?

Or how the issues with borders I named above prevent, for example, women getting abortions in ireland, or how some people from failed states have to live essentially undocumented lives.

I don’t really care, as long as it’s not middle class white women trying to shit on women who don’t meet their standards.