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Because there’s a specific law calling out gender identity discrimination. (Sex discrimination, too, but I still don’t understand why that doesn’t apply.)
If short kings get a law passed, then the ruler might have to go. But that law won’t be passed, because trans activism doesn’t generalize to every possible category.
If you're going to split hairs here then how about this (in addition to what @ControlsFreak said): a FtM trans wants acne medication. The medication is known to be harmful to pregnant females. The patient is visibly pregnant. Were they biologically male, the acne medication would be the right prescription with minimal side effects. The patient's government issued id says they are male.
Can the patient sue the doctor for discrimination if they refuse to give them the prescription? If the doctor relents and her baby is born with birth defects can they sue the doctor for that?
And if you're going to nitpick about pregnancy status being different from sex, then imagine a drug that has significantly different effects on women vs. men, or that she isn't visibly pregnant. Use the "Least Convenient Possible World" to avoid easy outs and address the meat of ControlsFreak's argument.
Doctor relents: don’t know, doesn’t really matter. Who ends up liable has nothing to do with discrimination.
Doctor refuses: no lawsuit, because pregnancy isn’t a protected class.
This isn’t a nitpick—it’s the central disagreement. A driver’s license does not indicate pregnancy. Nor does it indicate genitalia, hormone levels, sex-assigned-at-birth, or sex-as-a-metaphysical-truth. If a decision depends on one of these categories, the license is an imperfect proxy, superseded by more thorough proxies like “visibly pregnant” or “blood work.” Just use those!
CF hasn’t managed to set up a scenario where the license is actually important. I can’t think of any treatments that actually care about sex-as-recorded-by-Queensland rather than pregnancy, hormones, etc.
Well, the exception would be gender therapy. So we’d need a patient who bothered to get a female license, wants a therapy meant for transwomen, but is denied on the basis of being too male. That just sounds like the kind of thing this law is supposed to cover!
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I don't follow. Here you said that "[t]here’s no discrimination lawsuit in using the actual indicators for a treatment". So, I must ask again, given that there's a specific law calling out gender identity and sex discrimination,
Suppose the doc, a private service provider, proceeds according to the authoritative document and not the measurements, and B happens to die. Is that a successful lawsuit by the estate, according to pure law brain? Suppose the doc proceeds according to the measurements and not the authoritative document, and B happens to live. Is that a successful lawsuit by B?
We have a specific law. It is applied to private service providers. The document is authoritative.
Still no discrimination suit. What service is being withheld on the basis of sex or gender?
Maybe if the patient was demanding a service—a breastless transwoman desperate for a mammogram, or something. I could see that happening. But I’m reasonably confident our medical jurisprudence allows doctors to decline providing frivolous care. It certainly lets insurance opt out.
That’s all pretty far from your hypothetical lifesaving intervention. Did you have one in mind?
The different service that would have been provided to the other sex. At this point, I almost feel compelled to ask whether you think Giggle would have been perfectly legally fine if they had simply put males on the 'male server', talking to other males, and females on the 'female server', talking to other females. Then, in response to a complaint, would you be perfectly happy dismissing it by just observing that there is no service that is being withheld on the basis of sex or gender? Because to draw the line here seems to cut against the entire zeitgeist.
That’s not…look, the different service was never on the table. The patient didn’t request it. The diagnosis didn’t suggest it.
https://www.legislation.gov.au/C2004A02868/latest/text
“Less favourably.” There’s nothing less favourable about giving the medically correct treatment. No discrimination.
The patient was unconscious, so that was never on the table.
It sure was, and it sure did, if the chosen method of identifying sex was reversed.
...we're all the way back to, "What is correct?" Are you saying that the sex listed on the authoritative document is "incorrect"?
My brother in Christ—you chose the method. If the patient can’t demand anything, why does the license?
You keep saying the document is authoritative. I’m saying it’s not, because there isn’t a medical procedure in the world that cares about driver-license-sex, correct or not. So the mere presence of that license doesn’t create an obligation.
My brother in Christ—the entire question of this thread is about the government designation creating a government-enforced legal requirement on third-party service providers to respect the drivers-license-sex. If you'd like to say that the government designation creates no legal requirement for doctors, then it should equally make no legal requirement for this digital app.
Otherwise, you have to make a distinction - from the law - for why it creates a legal requirement for some private service providers and not for others.
I don’t think the license itself never created a legal requirement for anyone. The 1984 SDA did, but only by criminalizing “less favourable” treatment. In social media, that means access to your app. In medicine, though, it means some combination of desired and correct care.
I could imagine why waving your license would get you back into an app. It was harder to figure out how doing so would get you a particular treatment.
I think it’s kind of a moot point, because I misunderstood how the license was actually used in this case.
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I don't think the law let's you draw a distinction between "sex" and "drivers-license-sex". And why would "drivers-license-sex" create an obligation for a SocMed app, but not for medical services?
After further reading of the (summary) opinion, it doesn’t actually create the obligation there, either!
The crux is that sex and license-sex only mismatch when the subject is trans. Therefore, anything that only penalizes such a mismatch is unlawful discrimination.
Yes, you can ban any man or woman for being too masculine, so long as they haven’t specifically disavowed it at the QLD state level. If they have, they’re trans and protected.
Is this goofy? Maybe. Does it make the medical analogies fall apart? Oh yeah.
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