Oregon, My Oregon

 Via Jazz Shaw at Haut Hair, Portland bravely moves to stop "misgendering" the dead

Portland, Oregon, is committing a fresh new cardinal sin: Misgendering transgender individuals after they are dead, on their death certificates. (I know you’re all simply aghast.) Leaving aside for a moment the fact that the individuals in question have shuffled off this mortal coil and are unlikely to be offended, “correcting” this situation is going to have pronounced impacts on recordkeeping in terms of monitoring both public health and crime statistics. But in the name of wokeness, at least “parts of Oregon” (as noted in the linked article) will change their coroner forms to reflect gender identity instead of (or possibly in addition to) the deceased’s actual sex. This move is only the latest in Portland’s growing history of woke initiatives to pacify the transgender community. (Oregon Live)

Portland area health officials are calling for change after finding that death certificates misgendered more than half of transgender or nonbinary people who died in the decade ending last year.

A combined research effort by Multnomah, Washington and Clackamas county epidemiologists, published Aug. 31 in the Journal of Public Health Management & Practice and made available to the public free of charge for two weeks starting Wednesday, found that nearly 30 Portlanders’ gender identities were erased after death because there is no system to ensure those identities are recorded when people die.

The accuracy of death records is important not only for individuals and families but because they are used for research and can affect how federal money is directed. While previous studies have shown transgender people are more likely to die by suicide and homicide, for example, the data is limited because neither Oregon nor the federal government have systems to track gender identity upon death.

Arguing about someone’s pronouns while they are still alive is one thing, but altering death records is clearly another. This isn’t a simple matter of what name or sexual identity is put on someone’s tombstone. (And the family generally controls that directly anyway.) Death records are compiled and used to determine trends and protect the public. Actual gender (as opposed to imagined gender) is a key factor when studying both severe health issues and crime statistics. Monitoring suicide rates is also something that healthcare agencies take very seriously and that’s even more important when you’re talking about the transgender community, where suicide rates are significantly higher than among the general population.

Besides, how are they supposed to whine about being misgendered after death?