Why so serious with gender benders?

On Wednesday, the top court in the land of Rudyard Kipling ruled that 'woman is woman, and man is man, and never the twain shall meet'. According to Britain's Equality Act 2010 - by which people are protected against discrimination based on age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion/belief, and sexual orientation - women (and men) are to be defined by their biological gender status, the gender in which they were born. While Britain's Supreme Court assured this would not dilute protection given to transgender women or men - people whose gender identity differs from the sex with which they were born - as they would be protected by the equality law, the ruling does highlight Western societies' strange obsession to classify everything under the sun by pegging them down in categories, and to think in terms of binaries (e.g., Whites vs 'people of colour').

Defining features, much like values, change over time. A 'blind spot' applied to women, Jews and, later, Muslims in the Republican France of 'liberte, egalite, fraternite'. The Equal Protection Clause, embedded in the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution, took effect in 1868. While it mandated every person equal legal protection, initially, and for a significant period afterward, it didn't guarantee equality for women or Blacks. Until the Civil Rights Act finally outlawed discrimination based on race, colour, religion, sex or national origin in 1964, a mere five years before the first (hu)man landed on the moon. When US Congress ratified 'all' women the right to vote in 1920, African-American women were kept out of the 'all women' fray for decades.

While things like what constitutes 'womanly' behaviour - or, for that matter, 'manly behaviour' - have thankfully expanded and changed over time, definitional dogma even in liberal societies lingers in the name of protecting against dilution of women's rights. This is artificial legalese. In a world of fluid ethnicities, nationalities, etc, gender fluidity should be a given.