The media latched on to yet another story-that-ain’t-a-story. It’s supposed to be about a lawbreaker, Jesse Kipf, who forged a death… certificate. Kipf, a co-parent, doesn’t feel the need to support the children’s custodial birthing unit, and one sure-fire way to dodge financial obligations is to wake up dead.
So Jesse registers with the State of Hawaii as a corpse. It’s said that “dead [men] tell no tales” and happily, they don’t have to pay child support either.
But in a supposedly free society where we freely self-identify from an almost unlimited supply of at least 70 freely-defined genders—it’s so liberating how the government freely goes along with each one we make-up discover—we find ourselves painfully limited to a Neanderthal way of thinking that says we can only be dead or alive.
Ugh! That’s so binary.
I’ve known plenty of people in the hospital who were sicker’n dogs. Some of them got so busy pushin’ up daisies that in the end they finally kicked the bucket, but none of them were ever allowed to adjust their status while waiting to sprout wings and fly away. Knocking on death’s door isn’t the same as waking up full of vim and vigor, and we ought to be free to declare that. Just as there are nuances of gender, there are shades of life—including full zombie.
An enlightened society would embrace this. The Civil Rights Act needs to keep up.
Yet in a heavy-handed approach geared to strip us of personal agency and autonomy, Uncle Sugar and her merry band of jackboot thugs refuse to recognize that—all common sense aside—we are who we say we are: dead. That’s all Kipf wanted.
If Ellen Page gets to force its “you-cannot-call-me-by-my-deadname” façade down our collective throats, then why can’t Jesse Kipf claim to be six feet under?
Ellen, born a woman, demands to be affirmed as not-a-woman while Jesse, born alive, simply wants to be recognized as not-alive. Yet Page gets a pass while Kipf takes it on the chinbone. My brethren, these things ought not so to be.
(Financially, think of all the money one could save going through life as non-living. Income tax, property taxes… all gone. And that nasty death tax—by definition these only apply to the alive. They can’t be associated with the undead.)
Shoddy reporting and unjust laws
It appears that the story of Kipf, who hasn’t yet seen fit to declare any personal pronouns, is brought to us by a gaggle of reporters who couldn’t be bothered to dig any up, thus Jesse is presumptuously called a “Kentucky man.”
Bleah! That’s so non-DIE.
Necessarily, Kipf took matters into his own hands the hands associated with whatever pronouns have yet to be published. But what should have been applauded as a brazen can-do attitude on the part of the pre-posthumous dead to declare personal status (and demand everyone’s acquiescence) is instead handed out as a blatant crime.
Having a congenital vagina, there’s no law against a woman like Page calling itselves a trans, so why won’t we let Jesse be considered as good as dead? We support the one but not the other: How is this considered equality?
A movie star like the Pageboy can have their breasts surgically mutilated, but a corpse like Jesse can’t shave six figures off back child support. Where’s the ACLU?
There’s only one reason for this swift kick in the balls-yet-to-be-attached: The living have no respect for the dead. Frankly, cadavers are treated like second-class citizens, almost as if they can’t exist. But they have feelings just like the un-cadavered. They have abilities and dreams, and one day they’ll have rights too.
Jesse is the pioneer here, sprinting across the finish line to raise awareness for all departed stiffs (even those who can still walk, talk and work a computer). After all, you don’t have to live in a coffin when you’re dead. And you don’t have to work in Hollywood to have a deadname.
That is the. Actual. Story.
On cue, the media missed it. You might have missed it too if it wasn’t mentioned.
Astute readers could be forgiven for wondering how on god’s green earth was someone like Kipf, deceased or otherwise, able to access a government account that was almost two years dead old. An account—still alive active—assigned to someone who no longer held the position for which the account was registered. An account that should have been killed deleted. An account on which administrative oversight should have been exercised but which was obviously ignored for six hundred some-odd days.
Uh-huh, how in hell’s half-acre does this happen? (I bet you’re dying to know.)
If this is an example of the wonderful state of security in the Aloha State, then it’s bad on the island.
Carlton S. Shier, IV, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Kentucky, explained, “This case is a stark reminder of how damaging criminals with computers can be, and how critically important computer and online security is to us all.”
Um, apparently not.
That no official was investigated, audited, tried, punished or removed from office for failing to maintain online security in Hawaii is actually the. Real. Story.
Not the efforts of a dead man just trying to get by in a mean selfish world that refuses to grant him the authenticity of his dysphoria and stuff. And everything.
And death and taxes.
cites:
• https://archive.is/wip/Ulzj3
• https://archive.ph/wip/9GLp6
• https://archive.ph/CyNXH
• https://archive.is/SFO6x
• https://archive.is/LTkp2