Soon, there will be a third option for genders on Aussie passports like this one.
Humans are essentially a duality. There’s male and female, and that tends to be the way most people see the world/themselves. However, there are some folks that don’t quite fit in either box. For example, there’s the spokesperson for gender confusion and new Dancing With The Stars castmember Chaz Bono. She was born a woman, came out as a lesbian, then decided to become a man (though without the gender reassignment surgery). What would you consider him/her? Well, in Australia, he would have a third option. Australian passports are adding a third gender for those who don’t identify as either, called Gender X.
“X is really quite important because there are people who are indeed genetically ambiguous and were probably arbitrarily assigned as one sex or the other at birth,” said Australian Senator Louise Pratt, whose partner is transgender. “It’s a really important recognition of people’s human rights that if they choose to have their sex as indeterminate, that they can.”
The law is primarily to affect those who are transgender or in the process of changing sexes, the sexually ambiguous, those who were born intergender, or those who simply don’t want to indicate a gender. That’s a small, but growing, minority in our day and age. Given that there are some folks who don’t immediately identify as one gender or another when you look at them, it makes sense that they be given an assignment that they’re more comfortable with, and that might spare them a few hours’ difficulty getting through customs.
Tags: X, male and female and x genders on passports, Australia, Australian passports add third gender, indeterminate sex, transgender added to Australian passports, Louise Pratt, third gender on passports, transgender passports, intergender, intersex, transgender, new passport category for the genderless, genderless, third gender passports
