Federal Body Inspectors: The State Wants In Your Pants

Clean shirt, new shoes
And I don’t know where I am goin’ to.
Silk suit, black tie;
I don’t need a reason why.

This should not be a controversial statement, but it apparently is these days: the State has no legitimate interest in the contents of your pants.

Or mine; or anyone’s.

You could make an argument that sex is a reasonable piece of data to use to identify, say, a corpse, but that’s not really true.

Any piece of data that only eliminates half the population isn’t very useful as an identifier.

It may be enough in some quite specific scenarios, but in general it’s not particularly helpful.

And sex isn’t a useful sorting mechanism either.

In competitive activities like sports, the general range of ability between males and females overlaps quite a bit. In some areas one sex does have some statistical advantage, but that’s only at a population level not an individual one and it’s not a particularly significant difference anyway.

Even sorting prison populations by sex hasn’t done much to prevent inmate sexual abuse; designing a better prison system would be much more effective than that has been.

So there’s no reason the State should even know anyone’s sex.

As a general principle, the State should never even have any data that the State does not need to perform its function; that function being operating the communal parts of our society.

After all, you can’t misuse or abuse data you don’t have.

And the State does not need to know what’s in any of our pants.