Queereaders discussion

Did anyone else hear about Norrie May-Welby? I heard it first on the Young Turks Youtube channel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89DoHg...
Zie transgendered once from male to female, and then decided zie wasn't either and became known as gender neuter. Zie got the Australian goverment to allow hir to have hir birth certificated changed to reflect this.
But then later they canceled their decision.
See also:
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/03/...
http://gayrights.change.org/blog/view...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norrie_M...

I thought zie was fairly inspiring. But then I always did think that this sort of thing wouldn't really be allowed by any goverment since society as a whole dislikes anything they can't stick in one box or another, and Norrie and people like hir don't fit into the M or F box, but society will always try and make them fit.

What does everyone else think?

I remember hearing something about Australia allowing "sex not specified" on passports, but I didn't know the details or how it turned out.

I'm always annoyed by governmental gender policing. Why is it the government's business what gender I am anyway? How is my gender relevant to any official documents?

(*Gets all starry-eyed, seeing the future.*)

When I first started seeking information on such matters in late 1997, Australia was the only place in the world that had an offline organization devoted to androgyny (as the organization termed it). So I'm not surprised that this case took place in Australia.

Hopefully someday, within our children's lifetimes, they will do away with pronouncing gender at birth. Honestly that should be left up to each individual to determine for themselves without any undo influence either way. What you see on the outside has no bearing on what's going on inside of that person.

Oh and the first news I've heard on this topic in a long while!

People who do not identify as male or female have achieved formal legal recognition in Australia for the first time, after the NSW Court of Appeal overturned a ruling that everyone must be listed as a man or a woman with the Registry of Births Deaths and Marriages.

!!!

http://www.theage.com.au/nsw/legal-re...

Norrie appealed to the Court of Appeal and on Friday, three years later, won a near-total victory. The three-judge appeal panel unanimously declared that "as a matter of construction ... the word sex does not bear a binary meaning of 'male' or 'female'".

That's a beginning. It's high time that the Courts recognize that there are not a finite number of possible sexes, that it varies too much to actually classify.

Kelly wrote: "That's a beginning. It's high time that the Courts recognize that there are not a finite number of possible sexes, that it varies too much to actually classify."

Yes its certainly progress, but I think something like this is still a long way off for other countries, particularly america, where its common practice to peform surgery on childrens genitals soon after birth to make them conform to percieved binary standards. :S

Yes, especially states like Texas that introduced legislation to require chromosomal testing to ensure what they classified as male and female to be the only ones allowed to marry. All this while the rest of the country grapples with same-sex marriage. There's backward, then there's prehistoric mentality of epic preportions.

Again, if we could do away with gender classes alltogether, it would all be a moot point. Then couples, married or otherwise, would be joined by their compatibility as determined by their own choosing. No matter how large the majority, no one has the right to dictate consenting behaviour amoung adults.

Once upon a time gender specific dress was more common and photos were rare. In those days gender was an important identify feature. Now the opposite is true. Before I had my paperwork changed I used to joke (when giving talks about trans issues) that I could have gotten away with murder at any time. Anyone looking for me based on government identification and my old driver's license would have never found me. In short, its time to do away with legal gender identification. It's pointless.

I work at a government office that checks needs to verify ID and checks against the US Social Security Office database.

Posted before I was done. I HATE the GR phone app.

Anyway, last year they stopped checking gender. There were a number of gender errors in the Social Security database that caused problems, but we do have some transgender folks who are happy our records no longer have to cause them payment problem. This stuff is meaningful in ways people don't think about ahead of time.