Interesting comments on that story, Dana. The ones that bother me say that since the people in question identify as women, they should follow all laws as they apply to women.
Yeah, use that logic with regard to bathrooms. If you are an MTF in the women's restroom, someone calls you on it, and your picture ID labels you as male, you are in shaving cream up to your neck.
Until very recently, no laws gave a hang how people identified. For the most part, the law still doesn't care. Legally speaking, what mattered most (and still matters) was the legal definition and the documentation belonging to the people in question. If these were MTFs with male identification cards, they apparently did nothing illegal.
I don't really care why they went topless or why they initially refused to cover up. Yeah, maybe it's tacky. Maybe it's all for attention. Maybe they weren't making an ideological statement. But for me, the point is that existing laws not only do not account for people like us, they are often uniformly used against us. So people who are legally one sex who identify as another--or even people who have had their documents changed--are usually subjected to the MOST restrictive interpretation of the law, not the one that is most appropriate to their situation. Case in point, Littleton v Prange.
It's only so useful to protest, "You can't have it both ways! If you identify as a woman, then follow all the laws for women!" You know what? Number one, this particular law is a ridiculous and antiquated double standard. Number two, the laws regarding the sexes are all over the place, and there's no set guideline. The law does not uniformly treat trans women as women (especially when such people are arrested), yet people want trans women to voluntarily kowtow to all laws pertaining to women. Yet another double standard.
Trans people don't fit the established categories. Incidents like these will continue to happen until the law starts to catch up with us.
