At a recent forum for the Republican candidates for Secretary of State, a defiant Rep. Paul Scott refused to back down from his unusual strategy of targeting transgendered people and refusing to allow them to change the gender designation on their driver’s licenses.

As the Messenger previously reported, Rep. Scott entered the race for the Secretary of State job by declaring that he would “make it a priority to ensure transgender individuals will not be allowed to change the sex on their driver’s license in any circumstance.” Asked what problem this was intended to solve, he told the Messenger that it was all about “preventing people who are males genetically from dressing as a woman and going into female bathrooms.”

This left many people scratching their heads, wondering where there might be a public bathroom where they check your driver’s license before you enter. To add to the confusion, he told the Associated Press that the standard for determining one’s gender is that “you are who your DNA says you are.”

At a luncheon hosted by the Gerald Ford Women’s Club in Grand Rapids, Scott acknowledged in an interview that one’s gender designation on a driver’s license is not based on DNA testing. But when asked how he would deal with those whose DNA shows a mixed gender that does not fall easily into line with the simple male or female gender designation, he could only say that we should “take the subjectivity out of it.”

But objectively, there are many people who simply do not fall into those simple two categories. For example, one of every 1000 males are born with Klinefelter’s syndrome, which means rather than the normal XY chromosomal arrangement they have an extra X chromosome and are XXY instead. Such males often have shrunken penis and testicles and enhanced breast development, often leading to serious conflict within those people as to which category — if either — they belong to.

An agitated Scott had little to say about the reality of unclear gender for such people and others with similar kinds of transgender traits, declaring that “whatever you’re designated as when you’re born is what the government should recognize you as — no ambiguity there whatsoever.”

And never mind that reality is, in fact, often ambiguous.