She's a BOY!

A truly Shocking Scandal has been uncovered by the intrepid journalists over at CNSN, the Brent Bozell news establishment founded, we are informed, in order "to fairly present all legitimate sides of a story and debunk popular, albeit incorrect, myths about cultural and policy issues," which, translated from the original wingnut, means "to shovel a lot of paranoid horseshit that will be greedily spooned up like so much Chubby Hubby by resentful, gullible halfwits who'd gleefully inject frog piss into their eyeballs if they thought that might cause a half-second's annoyance to some imaginary liberal."

Anyway, here is the shocking scandal, which is indeed shockingly shocking in its shocking shockitude.

The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee’s health care legislation will give the Health and Human Services secretary the authority to develop “standards of measuring gender” -- as opposed to using the traditional "male" and "female" categories -- in a database of all who apply or participate in government-run or government-supported health care plans.

Shocking! Somehow! I guess! Somehow! For some reason!

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is required by the proposed law -- The Affordable Health Choices Act,which was voted out of committee on July 15  --  to create a database within one year of the law’s enactment that will include detailed information about those who sign up for government-run or supported health care programs, including their race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, language and disabilities.
 
The proposed law states that the database can use the Office of Management and Budget “standards for race and ethnicity measures.”
 
But for the collection of “gender” data, instead of using the categories “male” and “female," the legislation calls for “developing standards for the measurement of gender.”

It may surprise you, or it may not, given the high journalistic standards of a Brent Bozell enterprise, to learn that there is a truncated quotation in that last paragraph (as well as the lede) gasp. The original (pdf) reads:

In collecting data described in paragraph (1), the Secretary or designee shall... develop standards for the measurement of gender, geographic location, socioeconomic status, primary language and disability measures.

See, what they wanted you to think was that the US government wants to make it illegal for men not to like shopping, and girls not to like sports. Sibelius would come to your house and make all the guys wear panties, and all the chicks put on Axe Body Spray. At gunpoint! But instead it's just about collecting boring old demographic data in regards to how federal money is being spent on healthcare. Which is too bad, really, because if it were the panties and Axe thing, I would have gladly proposed John Waters be put in charge of the Gender Rectification Enforcement Squads, which would have made the typical COPS episode far more watchable.

Anyway, the bill is using "gender" not in place of the "categories" of "male and female" but rather in place of the word "sex." Apart from grammarians, most people nowadays see the terms as basically interchangeable. So what's the fuss? GAYS. GAYS ARE THE FUSS.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), “sex” refers to the biological and physiological differences that define men and women. “Gender” refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviors, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women....

“Gender identity” is routinely used by homosexual groups to define differences in sexual orientation, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and, in some cases, “questioning.”

I'd draw attention to the rather hysterical obsession with policing "socially constructed gender roles" betrayed by "Penny Starr" (the name of the article's author, who presumably grew up on Starr Street and once owned a Pekingese), who decided to read 410 pages into proposed legislation in order to horrify idiots about how homos are taking over the nation based upon a tendentious reading of word choice in the section about demographic data collection. But I assume you already caught on to that.

Instead I will invite you to read through the comments over there and get ready to laugh yourself ill, because they're (a) funnier and (b) spookier than anything I could ever write in a million million years. Oh what the heck, just one:

Since when is determining the *** of one person so bloody hard. God created men and women differently and this difference has worked for thousands of years into identifying if a person is a male (man) or female (woman). If my three year old can figure it out, you'd think the HHS Secretary and Congress would also be able to. As usual this is about putting individuals into groups of people (read voting blocks) and not about health care reform. Hey, you in Congress, we voting American citizens (well, a darn good number of us) are not stupid....how will this improve health care? Seriously, why put this into the law if you knuckle-heads are trying to bring health care costs under control? These are honest questions that deserve honest answers from the wizards of smart in Washington, DC.

This one is good because "Wizards of Smart" would be a fun band name, and because it demonstrates that if the bill did use the term "sex," "Penny Starr" would still have been able to gin up a preposterous lunatic freakout of a "scoop."

MORE. I don't think this is likely to turn out to be the exact same Penny Starr, but you can see how the name confusion could have tortured a prissy dimwit unto... madness! Or at least slightly more madness than was there already.