The statute presumes capacity; practice too often presumes its absence. On the gendered weight of that gap.
What follows is not a verdict but a reading — of the text, the reasoning, and the people the provision actually touches. The distinction matters, because the same clause can be described as protection or as omission depending on where one chooses to begin.
Reading the text closely
A statute drafted in neutral terms can still distribute its burdens unevenly. The question is rarely whether a rule mentions gender, but whether its operation, traced through to the counter and the courtroom, lands the same way on everyone it governs.
The label does not decide the case; the choice of what to defer to does.
Read through a gender-sensitive lens, the issue is not only doctrinal. It is about whose account the law treats as the default, and whose has to be argued for from first principles each time.
What the record shows
The documentary record — affidavits, guidelines, the long procedural histories of those turned away at the threshold — is where the abstraction meets its consequence. An argument that never reaches that record is an argument conducted in the abstract.
That is the question this platform exists to keep on the record.