The first thing some parents want to know about their children is their sex. Many want it revealed to them even before the child is born, and once told what the sex is, they immediately start forming their unborn children's identity based on what happens to be forming in between their legs.
From picking out pink curtains with flowers for the girls, to choosing blue sheets with cars for the boys; from expecting a nice docile character from the girl, to bracing themselves for a mischievous brat of a boy; from dreaming about their girl's future as a beautiful bride, to imagining their boy graduating from medical school... the list of ludicrous gendered expectations goes on and on.
But what if it wasn't so straightforward? What if, like intelligence and personality, it was not possible to know our children's sex before we got to know them? And, perhaps even more importantly, before they got to know themselves?
48 year old Norrie May-Welby was born in Scotland and registered as male at birth. However Norrie felt gravely uncomfortable with the male gender. In an attempt to fix this incongruity between her body and mind, at the age of 23 Norrie started the long and painful process of gender re-assignment treatment to become a woman.
It started with hormone therapy and followed by multiple surgeries. But once again, after the gruelling ordeal, Norrie did not feel comfortable living entirely as female, and at the risk of being called crazy or even institutionalized, Norrie moved to Australia, stopped the hormone treatment, and openly claimed to identify as neutrally sexed -neither 100% male nor 100% female.
25 years later, Australia has made gender history. It became the first country in the western world to recognise an individual's sex as "not specified". The New South Wales Government issued 48 year old Norrie with a ‘Sex Not Specified' Recognition Certificate - the equivalent of a birth certificate that is given to immigrants who want to have their change of sex recorded.
The word ‘zie' was also legally recognised by the Australian Government as a gender-neutral pronoun. Unlike, ‘his' and ‘her' or ‘she' and ‘he', ‘zie' or ‘hir' connotes neither male nor female.
Despite Australia's progress, the rest of the West seems to be lagging way behind the East in its recognition of such concepts of oneness. Most Westerners presume that everyone has one real gender identity. Some of us might go as far as recognising that someone's gender identity is incongruent with their anatomy, but we seem to be very far away from accepting that some of us simply cannot choose to be of one specific gender.
Even children who are biologically androgynous (or as they had been traditionally referred to - hermaphrodites) are expected to be of one gender. They are usually operated upon within weeks of their birth and the surgically removed gender is presumed to have been the 'false' one. But there are many recorded cases of inter-sexed children who are traumatised by the elimination of their sexual duality, and as they grow into adults they seek medical procedures to restore their discarded sex, but once again, at the expense of the surviving sex.
This is the result of society that adamantly believes that the sexes are mutually exclusive. On the contrary India, the Philippines and the indigenous American cultures, do not try to ‘fix' their two-spirited off spring. There, transgendered people are held in high esteem as they are considered a rarity blessed with the best of both spirits.
In January 2010 several doctors declared that they were unable to determine Norrie as either male or female. Zie has no gonads and the hormonal system is not typically male nor female. In addition, Norrie's psychological identity is also neutral. This certified Norrie as physically and psychologically androgynous and zie has since then begun doing the rounds to have all offending records changed. Zie started with hir bank which had to bring in several IT gurus to fix the system to include a new ‘sex not specified' category.
Science and experience has proven over and over that not all girls will want to play with dolls, that not all women will like heels and make up, that not all boys will like action heroes, and that not all men will like football and beer, and yet these stereotypes and expectations prevail in our heads.
Science and medicine are also pointing the crazy finger at parents and doctors who take a decision for inter-sexed children by choosing a sex and operating them a few weeks after birth. With the prevalence of transsexual children up to 1 in every 500 births (Olyslager and Conway -2007) the trend is now to wait until the children are older and a better psychological diagnosis can be made.
With the new opportunity to choose to be gender-neutral, many might be able to avoid having to go under the knife and a enduring a lifetime of pain and unhappiness. Granted, they might grow up feeling out of place, and society might laugh at them for being different, but in time I hope that they will laugh back at us for being all the same.