14 DAY TRIAL // Germany has become the first country to allow a third gender on birth certificates, applicable to those babies who are born as something other than male or female from a physical standpoint, Time magazine reports.
Starting November 1, parents are able to check the “indeterminate sex” box on the baby’s certificate, which means that the child is recognized as being neither boy nor girl, but “intersex.”
Previously to the law that made such a thing possible, parents had to opt for a gender in the case of a baby born with physical characteristics of both; the baby was put through surgery first to make it boy or girl, and only afterwards registered on the birth certificate as either one or the other.
Time points out to a report in the German Ethics Council in 2012, which claimed that “many people who are subjected to ‘normalizing’ operation in their childhood have later felt it to have been a mutilation and would never have agreed to it as adults.”
The option of a third gender would virtually eliminate surgery and allow parents to raise their child as he or she was born. The child would decide later in life on what gender surgery should make possible, and not have the parents make that call instead.
Intersex people are “one of the most invisible groups in German society,” but this third gender option on birth certificates doesn’t even begin to solve the problem, Time notes. It is, however, a step into that direction.