Very very poor journalism.
"Beginning next month, people born in New York will be able to change historical records – permanently. People who were born girls will be able to say they were actually born boys. People who were actually born boys will be able to say they were born girls."
Fact is that..
"All but three states now allow people who have had a sex change to get a new birth certificate and New York City has done so since 1971. The city now issues about a dozen of the revised birth certificates a year. "
The story here is that in NYC, you no longer need to show proof of surgery any more. But unfortunately, this very very poorly written article misses the main point.
Farah's purpose in this article is not, I think, to report on the whole process of the deconstruction of sex, but to spell out the implications of this latest kink: namely, that sex-reassignment is now a matter of say-so rather than one of surgery.
Sex-change surgery, unethical as it is (damaging a healthy body so it will match a dysphoric mind) at least requires a major commitment on the part of the shape-shifter: a sizeable sacrifice of time, money, and various body parts.
Now it approaches a level of mere self-identification: for instance, you have to establish that you have lived "in the manner of" the opposite sex for two years. How could anyone contest that? How could it be proved or disproved?
If the categories of "male" and "female" or "man" and "woman" are now too socially ambiguous or ideologically fraught, birth records should specify that the party was born with "XX" or "XY" chromosomes (or "other," in the exceedingly rare case of chromosomal anomalies.) That way the records would still have some relationship to demographic and medical reality. And if there's no commitment to medical reality, why keep records?
I'm not sure the article as written is all that misleading.