The Genderless Future

Newsweek has an article called “Are We Facing a Genderless Future?” by Barbara Kantrowitz and Pat Wingert this week about the genderless future, and the first person who is legally genderless. The person lives in Australia and is listed in the birth registry as nether male nor female, the article states…

This spring, an Australian named Norrie May-Welby made headlines around the world as the world’s first legally genderless person when the New South Wales Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages sent the Sydney resident a certificate containing neither M for male or F for female.

For a few days, it appeared that the 48-year-old activist and performer had won a long legal battle to be declared “sex not specified”—the only category that felt right to this immigrant from Scotland. May-Welby’s journey of gender identity can only be characterized as a long and winding road. Registered male at birth, May-Welby began taking female hormones at 23 and had sex-change surgery to become a woman, but now doesn’t take any hormones and identifies as genderless. The prized piece of paper May-Welby sought is called a Recognised Details Certificate, and it’s given to immigrants to Australia who want to record a sex change.

The government has since rescinded the birth certificate and Norrie is appealing the decision.

The article goes on to talk about the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) and the changes proposed for the fifth edition, changing “Gender Identity Disorder” to “Gender Incongruence” (I wrote about it here), on how the modern view of gender in not binary but a continuum or a spectrum.

But that seemingly simple change of language could help usher in a new era, in which a person’s gender could be expressed or experienced as male, female, “in between,” or “otherwise.” “People who work in this area have very flexible notions of gender,” Drescher says. “We don’t want to force people to fit into a doctor’s categories,” even though, he concedes, most cultures “tend to think in binaries.”

Bockting predicts that such binary thinking will eventually disappear. Many scientists, he says, see gender as a continuum and acknowledge that some people naturally fall in the middle. Gender, Bockting [associate professor and clinical psychologist at the University of Minnesota Medical School] says, “develops between the biological and the environmental. You can’t always detect gender by physical evidence. You have to ask the person how they identify themselves; in that sense, it’s psychological.”

Many people still think of gender as male and female, totally ignoring intersex people and about 1 in 1500 births are intersexed and that number does not take into count persons who identify as transgender which also about 1 in 2000 births.

The article goes on and talks about the history of genderless people in societies,

Even before the advent of sex-change surgery, there were always people who felt they didn’t fit into either gender. In India, a group of people called hijra have existed for centuries. They are typically biological males who dress as women but consider themselves to have neither gender, Bockting says. There is also a long tradition of eunuch culture. Even today, other countries are more comfortable with the idea of gender variance. Drescher says that France has removed transsexuality from its list of psychiatric disorders and put it in the category of rare diseases. The British government has also declared that transsexuality is “not a mental illness,” but people who want a sex-change can get treatment under the National Health Service.

So, what do we learn from this? What would you do if your child came to you and said that they felt they should be the other gender? There was an article in the Chicago Tribune by By Nara Schoenberg,

When kids cross the gender divide

Does your 4-year-old son dress up in his big sister's tiaras and princess costumes?

Does your 3-year-old daughter hate dolls?

With celebrity gossip sites buzzing over Angelina Jolie's comment that her 4-year-old daughter, Shiloh, wants to be a boy, media reports spotlighting rare cases of transgender children and even children's books beginning to tackle the issue, concerned parents are sifting through a lot of contradictory information.

"I think parents are very worried and confused and there isn't clear-cut advice," says Ellen Perrin, chief of developmental-behavioral pediatrics at the Floating Hospital for Children at Tufts Medical Center in Boston. "It's a complex issue."

Childhood gender behavior varies a lot, experts say, and there is a wide range of reasons a boy may want long hair (maybe he identifies with his favorite sports star) or a girl may refuse to wear dresses (perhaps they're just not her style).

What's more challenging for parents is when a child consistently pursues a range of behaviors strongly associated with the opposite sex. A boy might play with Barbies, wear dresses, vehemently reject sports and say that he wants to be a girl. A girl might insist on playing only with boys, get a boy's haircut and express strong discomfort with her own body parts.
[…]
Therapists differ dramatically in their approach to these children, with some taking the relatively new approach of supporting kids who want to live openly as members of the opposite sex. Others encourage kids to discard their more pronounced behaviors, explore new interests and embrace their own gender.

Many therapists take the middle ground of, say, accepting a very determined boy's desire to wear dresses and saying it's fine for him to do so at home, but strongly encouraging him to refrain from that behavior in school, where he might encounter unpleasant responses.

"I think the general trend has been to take more of a stance of tolerance toward the behavior instead of the old type of stance where they would yell at (these boys), criticize them, punish them for any sort of girlish behavior and send them off to military schools," says Gregory Lehne, an assistant professor of medical psychology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "That didn't work particularly well."

Nor does beating them to death.

"Parents should be concerned if their children are concerned," says Ellen Perrin, chief of developmental-behavioral pediatrics at the Floating Hospital for Children at Tufts Medical Center. "If this is causing discomfort or distress in the child, they need to talk to the child and figure out what's going on.

"Some children, they're kind of miserable and those parents need to get some help. Nobody's going to change the child, but sometimes parents can be given advice that can make life easier."

As the article points out only 5 to 25 percent of the gender variant children grow up to be transgender. Your choice as parents determine what the mental health of the child will be when they grow up. Will they carry a guilt complex, feeling that what they feel is wrong or will they know love.