From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com:
In an orgasm of political correctness and, well, silliness, Metro-North, thepublicly owned commuter railroad that serves southwestern Connecticut and thelower Hudson Valley, announced that it will no longer note a purchaser's gender identification on month-long train tickets.
The railroad said that it had used such identification to make it more difficult for riders to let others use their monthly passes. Makes sense! And one would think that police seeking suspects on trains or in train station might, from time to time, like to know the sex of suspects they seek. Gender-identifying tickets could help.
But Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy opined. "We should not be using antiquated gender norms as a method of personal identification.’’
The wonderful Chris Powell, managing editor ofthe Manchester (Conn.) Journal Inquirer asked:
“{H}ow can the governor be sure that there are no longer any circumstances in which it is useful to distinguish male from female? While the governor seems to think that the right of anyone to assume either gender at any time trumps the right of sexual privacy in bathrooms, he strangely has not yet insisted on erasing the divisions between boys and girls and men's and women's sports. ‘’
“But even if the governor really thinks that gender norms are ‘antiquated,’ there's not enough time left in his term for him both to run Connecticut's creaky old government and to persuade the rest of the world that there are no longer boys and girls and men and women, just undifferentiated life forms.’’
