Germans legally can choose a third gender
January 28, 2019 8:25 AM   Subscribe

Germans may now select “diverse” as an option for gender on birth certificates and other legal records. Of course, there's a caveat as well as some controversy.
posted by dancing leaves (26 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: Poster's Request -- loup



 
Under the new law, adults must produce a doctor’s statement or other medical certification confirming their gender fluidity in order to change their existing designation to the new option.

I also had to do this to change my gender marker to "X", in Canada.

It was pretty weird, because my doctor didn't have to affirm that I was undergoing any aspects of medical transition (although it happens that I am), she just had to be a doctor and say, yep, this person is indeed nonbinary. Definitely a waste of her time and mine.
posted by ITheCosmos at 8:44 AM on January 28, 2019 [9 favorites]


It is so weird how even when these ostensibly beneficial (and actually beneficial, despite their serious flaws) laws get passed, they manage to include absolute wallbanger-level mistakes in them that any 16-year-old with a Tumblr account could identify and explain in an instant. We have such a long way to go with trans issues that even the trans-friendly politicians are just blatantly clueless and furthermore appear not to even know anyone who could explain the very simple reasons why some of the decisions they are making are so far off base as to be not even wrong.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 8:49 AM on January 28, 2019 [5 favorites]


I'm hoping one of these days, some government will just decide that there's no compelling reason for a gender marker to be on an ID at all. Like, if someone's using a stolen ID, are they really going to find one with accurate height, hair and eye color, and then get caught because the gender marker is wrong?

It's just not even necessary. Instead of 3rd markers, we ought to have none.
posted by explosion at 8:49 AM on January 28, 2019 [14 favorites]


I can just change it to an X which not that happy about.

I was excited to hear that this was being permitted on New York birth certificates (because I have one!), then disappointed to learn that it wasn't the state, just the city. :(
posted by octobersurprise at 9:05 AM on January 28, 2019 [1 favorite]


I've been modestly campaigning to change my organization's style guide away from "he or she" to the indefinite "they," so this is a bit of a help.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 9:12 AM on January 28, 2019 [1 favorite]


It is so weird how when these laws get passed, they manage to include absolute wallbanger-level mistakes

I was reading that it was legislation forced by court order, rather than from legislators themselves. We will have to wait for someone to champion a change, rather than react to courts.
posted by eustatic at 9:18 AM on January 28, 2019 [1 favorite]


It's just not even necessary. Instead of 3rd markers, we ought to have none.

Yeah, it's disappointing in this case that the court said "either add another option or get rid of the whole thing" and German lawmakers were like, "great, we'll add another option! and we'll make any who wants it need medical certification first!", conveniently ignoring how inherently traumatising interacting with any kind of medical structure can be while trans.

One of the many reasons I've put off doing any kind of stronger social transitioning (as non-binary) than changing my appearance is the thought of having to talk about it in a medical setting. They already entirely lost my trust on mental health; they do not get to say a word about my gender.
posted by terretu at 9:24 AM on January 28, 2019 [10 favorites]


As I've said before, gender should be a text field, not a drop-down.
posted by Mogur at 9:36 AM on January 28, 2019 [2 favorites]


"Free-form, go nuts!"
posted by octobersurprise at 9:42 AM on January 28, 2019 [4 favorites]


It's just not even necessary. Instead of 3rd markers, we ought to have none.

100%
posted by nikaspark at 10:08 AM on January 28, 2019 [4 favorites]


“Gender designation has been an objective fact since the beginning of humanity, just like age and body shape,” said Beatrix von Storch, a leading lawmaker from the party, the strongest opposition force in the German Parliament.

Whoops there, Beatrix, you do realize that age and body shape pretty much definitely change throughout a person's life, right?

I'm also musing about how my tanned grandfather's birth certificate indicated him as "black" but his paler full siblings had "white" on theirs. If race is a thing this makes no sense. If he had it fixed to Multiracial later on, that would have been more precise, and less confusing. What I'm trying to say I guess is that birth certificates have never been an exact science, It's even estimated that in 1 to 2% of cases they have the wrong birth father indicated. So society won't be harmed by allowing people to correct mistakes in their gender, and anyone who claims so may very well have their own "agender" (sorry).
posted by xigxag at 11:57 AM on January 28, 2019 [2 favorites]


I can't read the article as I've reached my "read for free" limit for now, but once again, I don't get how an individual can be diverse. He's male, I'm female, you're diverse. Huh?
posted by ThatCanadianGirl at 12:57 PM on January 28, 2019


“Gender designation has been an objective fact since the beginning of humanity, just like age and body shape,” said Beatrix von Storch, a leading lawmaker from the party, the strongest opposition force in the German Parliament.
Fascism insists on producing strictly fixed categories, particularly on fixed, patriarchal, categories of gender.

(Oddly, I'm in the middle of a re-read of Rachel Pollack's run of The Doom Patrol and I'm half-way through The Teiresias Wars, the story line that pits the Builders, who seek to impose their rigidity on the world, against the fluidity of the Teiresiae, Cliff, the cyborg, and Kate, the trans woman with the power to coagulate liquids and dissolve solids, and I'm just like wow this is nearly 30 years old and still so OTM.)
posted by octobersurprise at 1:02 PM on January 28, 2019 [3 favorites]


It actually took some digging to find that the actual term used is "divers" which has the translation of "various." Probably someone who is more fluent in German could provide some more detail, but it looks like they're creating a catch-all category for intersex and nonbinary persons equivalent to "other" or "X." This is possibly related to a 2013 (year possibly wrong) decision regarding intersex children, now that standards of care have shifted to medical intervention only in extreme cases before adulthood. The above link says:
The decision was in favour of an appeal brought by an intersex adult and said that courts and state authorities should no longer compel intersex people to choose between identifying as male or female.
Of course, anti-trans and anti-nonbinary people are already throwing vapors about nonbinary trans people in relationship to this, but I don't even understand German on a preschool level and can't really evaluate the scope of this decision and I don't trust the English-language newspapers to get it right here.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 1:43 PM on January 28, 2019 [3 favorites]


As I've said before, gender should be a text field, not a drop-down.

I agree, but also wanted to say: have you seen those websites that have a dropdown for birth year, so you have to scroll through more than 80 entries (or type a shortcut)? If that is acceptable to anyone, then surely dropdown length is a poor excuse not to support a huge number of possible gender values.
posted by davejay at 1:50 PM on January 28, 2019 [2 favorites]


the actual term used is "divers" which has the translation of "various."
"It was a fairye, as al the peple semed.
Divers folk diversely they demed;
As many heddes, as manye wittes ther been."
— Geoffrey Chaucer, The Squire's Tale.
posted by octobersurprise at 1:51 PM on January 28, 2019 [4 favorites]


I'm not up for doing a 101 on nonbinary, genderqueer, or intersex lives tonight, but "divers" sounds like the government met a judicial mandate by creating a category to catch all the people who don't want to be designated male or female.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 3:08 PM on January 28, 2019 [3 favorites]


I like the term QUILTBAG, but I'm sure some would object to the G being last.

But for a third gender I like the English language designation "none of the above". (NOTA) Otherwise we get "misc."
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:43 PM on January 28, 2019 [2 favorites]


As mentioned above, the translation of divers is various. In the context of a form, it would be understood to mean „other“, meaning anyone who is not male or female.
posted by exquisite_deluxe at 3:56 PM on January 28, 2019 [1 favorite]


I'm not really baffled at all that multiple news agencies are choosing the most politically loaded of all possible one-word English translations.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 4:23 PM on January 28, 2019 [1 favorite]


“Gender designation has been an objective fact since the beginning of humanity, just like age and body shape,” said Beatrix von Storch, a leading lawmaker from the party, the strongest opposition force in the German Parliament.

Whoops.


I spit out a bit of coffee at that line, myself. Talk about poor examples to support a position.

I wonder what body shape and age (not birthdate) are on her ID?
posted by rokusan at 10:54 PM on January 28, 2019 [2 favorites]


As I've said before, gender should be a text field, not a drop-down.

Society run via MeFi profiles. I could get behind that.
posted by rokusan at 10:54 PM on January 28, 2019


Gender is not biological destiny it’s a concept with deep fascist roots in upholding white supremacy and it’s time we disabuse ourselves of the notion that gender is a globally relevant biological truth because it’s absolutely not.
posted by nikaspark at 9:39 AM on January 29, 2019 [1 favorite]


it’s a concept with deep fascist roots in upholding white supremacy

I'm not trying to argue but rather ask-- why is gender correlated to white supremacy/colonialism? I know many societies have had third or other gender roles, but I've never heard of one who didn't have the concept altogether.

I'm also not sure how to square the acceptance of diverse gender identities with "gender is bad"-- is that how nonbinary people feel about gender?
posted by noxperpetua at 10:19 AM on January 29, 2019


gender is a western colonial/settler construct. Whatever words other societies and ethnic/religious groups use to describe how bodies and experiences navigate society don't necessarily have to be enumerated by Western European concepts of how gender and biology interact.

My personal thoughts are that we need to engage with gender as it engages with us, but we need to not think of it as a globally comprehensive biological fact. It's a powerful social construct that has roots in the enlightenment and maintains enormous relevance and meaning to people who live our lives trying to navigate and "boot up into" societies where western gender holds special meaning.

So basically how that works out "as applied" is that I have to engage with gender as a construct and how it fundamentally impacts and alters my life, and yet at the same time wrestle with how since whiteness drove a lot of this construct, gender has become an extension of whiteness in that western societies can't imagine how bodies and experiences can interact socially outside the entire concept of gender. Because that is how white supremacy works. White supremacy works in a method where it becomes the entirety of anything it touches and eventually it becomes impossible to see anything outside how whiteness perceives itself. This is how gender operates as an extension of whiteness.

So to that, I now see being "trans" as an external assignment based on how gender is an extension of whiteness and is seen as a global biological fact that sets up "cis as default standard bearer" with everything else having to compare itself to how "not cis" we are. I'm trans because I'm not cis. In other cultures I would be something else.

Where I'm headed is that I'm starting to use "lost body" and "lost experience" as a way to describe my dysphoria outside of the solely western-centered concept of gender and "found body" and "found experience" to describe my attempts to realign and reclaim my relationship to society in the same manner.

I don't believe gender should be abolished, I believe we should stop seeing it as the global extent of how bodies and experiences meet the societies and cultures they exist and construct up within.
posted by nikaspark at 10:37 AM on January 29, 2019 [3 favorites]


I'm also not sure how to square the acceptance of diverse gender identities with "gender is bad"-- is that how nonbinary people feel about gender?

I think one of the advantages and disadvantages we have here is that nonbinary people are a divers group with multiple ideas and perspectives who sometimes, but not always, end up doing some forms of activism together.

In my opinion, "X" or "other" legal designation is a necessary step. Part of the legal problem for Germany is that the courts already decided that it can't force male or female designation on intersex infants, and if you're opening that door it doesn't make sense to force intersex persons to choose as adults. That designation won't smooth over all the rough areas where people who fall into the uncanny valley face largely unnecessary discrimination, but it helps.

But another side to the equation is so many interactions are unnecessarily gendered in ways that put nonbinary and GNC people into uncomfortable situations. So questioning why those points (such as clothing standards) need to be organized on the basis of gender is part of the picture.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 11:14 AM on January 29, 2019 [2 favorites]


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