Eliminate Gender On Birth Certificates?

A Canadian who claims to be neither male nor female has had a baby.

This individual believes that babies should have the right to choose what gender they want to be. Therefore, birth certificates should not specify a child’s gender.

I thought that “gender” is cultural, while “sex” is biological. So what birth certificates record is the baby’s “sex.” Feminists made that distinction, playing down the connections between biology and culture, but now transgenderists are insisting that “sex” too is cultural. Actually, neither gender nor sex are cultural, but are rather individual self-determinations. (As in this mother who identifies as “neither male nor female.”)

Here is a modest proposal: Instead of listing gender on birth certificates, other legal documents, applications, etc., just put down what chromosomes people have in in every cell of their bodies: XX or XY.

At some point, to solve the pronoun dilemma, we could assign pronouns based on the chromosome pattern each person has: XX could use “she, her, hers.” And XY could use “he, him, his.”

Interestingly, XX individuals can have babies, with the help of someone who is XY. (There can be no babies from couples if both are XX or if both are XY.) Maybe that could be the basis of family law.

But perhaps that objective genetic identity might interfere with an individual’s right to gender self-determination. In that case, the individual should complain to Nature, whose laws, however, are not subject to human courts or legislation.

Read about the case after the jump.

From Newborn baby may be the first to be registered ‘gender unknown’ because its mum insists only the tot can decide what sex it wants to be:

A PARENT who identifies as a “non-binary trans person” is demanding their baby is given the world’s first “gender unknown” birth certificate.

Canadian Kori Doty, who has a moustache and claims to be neither male or female, has been fighting to keep Searyl Atli’s gender off government records since giving birth last November.

Doty, who prefers to be referred to as “they” rather than “he” or “she”, told CBC they are “raising Searyl in such a way that until they have the sense of self and command of vocabulary to tell me who they are.”

They added: “I’m recognising them as a baby and trying to give them all the love and support to be the most whole person that they can be outside of the restrictions that come with the boy box and the girl box.”

Doty is trying to get British Columbia to issue the child with a birth certificate which does not have a gender marker.

But while the Canadian province has sent the baby health cards with an “undetermined” gender, authorities have refused to issue the certificate.

[Keep reading. . .]

Image from page 216 of “The physical basis of heredity” (1919), Flickr, Public Domain. [In reproduction, the sperm cell from the man and the egg cell from the woman derive from splitting a complete cell. Thus, the XY cells in a man produce some sperm cells that carry an X and some that carry a Y. The egg cells in a woman, splitting from XX, all have a single X chromosome. When a sperm and an egg comes together, the new individual that is formed may have a Y and an X, thus becoming male, or an X and another X, thus becoming female. The chart shows the possibilities.]