A female couple can choose to conceive. A male couple—Barrie and Tony from Chelmsford, England—can choose to conceive and both be registered as the biological fathers of their children not so much on the technical grounds that they had “co-mingled” their sperm before shipping it out to their Fallopian time-share in California but out of a more basic sympathy that this is how Barrie and Tony “self-identify” and it would be cruel to deny them.
A woman in Bend, Ore., can choose to become a man, and then a “pregnant man.” A man can choose to become a woman. A man can choose to get halfway to becoming a woman, and then decide it’s more fun to “live in the grey area.”
Biologically, Barrie or Tony, but not both, is the sole father of their child; the “pregnant man” is pregnant but not a man; the he/she living in “the grey area” is in reality black or white—at least according to what we used to call “the facts of life.” But issuers of passports, drivers’ licences, even birth certificates and no doubt one day U.S. Department of Homeland Security visas now defer to the principle of “self-identification.”
So, I think I get the logic here. If we all have to agree that Stan/Loretta can have not only the right to have babies, but the actual babies themselves, then reality really is a construct of the imagination and we can have anything we want and everyone else has to go along with it, right?
OK, index fingers on temples, eyes squeezed shut as tight as they will go, and concentrate...
I hereby self-identify as fabulously wealthy.
Oh, and that I look like a 23 year-old Diana Rigg.
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