Gender Identity for babies in Germany

[Curious]

I am watching CNN and they are talking about a new law that is starting in Germany soon where when a baby is born the parents can choose M, F or X for the babies gender. This will allow the child to choose a gender as an adult (or maybe an older child, they didn't really specify).

It was just a little bit they talked about at the very end of whatever show was on. They didn't have any footage or anything with it. I just thought it was interesting and wanted to post about it before I forget.

Maybe we have some members from Germany that can comment on it with more authority.

Edit: I was able to find this article about it: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/germany-of ... d=20029285

[kamcho_papio]

I find this fascinating. I had a student from Germany whose burning question was whether Leslie White was a man or a woman. When I said, "man," she said it was strange that it was unclear from the name, etc. I was aware of the fact that man countries have more structured name policies, but I never really considered gender as one of those factors. I had a French instructor who said her parents had to petition for permission to use a non-French name.

So, anyway, also waiting to read some comments. I would also like to know what the X-type names would be.

[Ariel]

I believe that a person should be able to legally be the gender they identify with-whatever it is. But the idea of raising a child as an X seems so foreign and difficult to me.

On one hand, this would make life a lot easier for those children that identify as a different gender than the one they were born with physically. Yet, on the other hand, I would find it so difficult to not ascribe gender attributes to a child while raising them.

I think the best thing about this law is that it makes the legal process less rigid in regards to legally changing your gender-at any age.

[uber frau]

X is also an officially allowed gender in Australia. It's mostly used by adults who identify as intersex (I'm not sure what the minimum legal age is) but they have birth certificates too. I think the birth certificate records sex, not gender, so they're only available for children born with indeterminate genitals. I think you can have a birth cert reissued if you have surgery or find out later you're biologically different from what you were identified as at birth but not if you simply swap gender identity.

The Australian passport records gender so you don't need the birth cert to match it.

[kamcho_papio]

Wow, I totally misread the article--why did I think it was about names? Anyway, yes. I agree that listing a child as without a specific biological sex could be difficult but ultimately revolutionary. I'm trying to think about why it really matters, and I keep coming up with various cultural fallacies.

[Cran]

This topic hasn't garnered much attention in Germany itself. It's just something that's been newly introduced.

As we do not really have a conservative "Religious Right" powerful in politics like in the US, it's also not a loaded topic. Even the "Bild", Daily Fail for Germans, did comment neutrally on the issue.

The law does not mean the parents can choose at will to declare their baby to be without identifiable sex (X) at will for personal reasons ("We want to raise our child without gender expectations!"), but applies to children that are born, for example, with testes AND ovaries. The law wants to protect such children from a choice the child could possibly not identify with later, especially as many children have been operated upon to make them conform to one sex, defined by parents and medical staff, not themselves. The law is not intended to create a third sex, but to make room for a later decision, but personally, I think it will indeed lead to the establishment of a third sex, because you can't force people to make the choice to be male or female, say, on their 18th birthday.

[Curious]

This topic hasn't garnered much attention in Germany itself. It's just something that's been newly introduced.

As we do not really have a conservative "Religious Right" powerful in politics like in the US, it's also not a loaded topic. Even the "Bild", Daily Fail for Germans, did comment neutrally on the issue.

The law does not mean the parents can choose at will to declare their baby to be without identifiable sex (X) at will for personal reasons ("We want to raise our child without gender expectations!"), but applies to children that are born, for example, with testes AND ovaries. The law wants to protect such children from a choice the child could possibly not identify with later, especially as many children have been operated upon to make them conform to one sex, defined by parents and medical staff, not themselves. The law is not intended to create a third sex, but to make room for a later decision, but personally, I think it will indeed lead to the establishment of a third sex, because you can't force people to make the choice to be male or female, say, on their 18th birthday.

Thank you for a more local take on this, Cran. They just had another little blurb on CNN (I swear I am addicted to CNN since the shutdown...ugh) about this law and they said that infants born with indeterminate gender (which I took to mean sexual organs of both males and females) are approximately 1 in 2,000. That doesn't seem to be all that rare, when you consider how many babies are born in a given year.

I think it's a good law and hope more places follow suit.

[Confused_by_religion]

Cran has really put it well.

I live in Germany and the law hasn't made any huge big headlines where I live. More like "okay, makes sense, will only apply to a tiny group of people". Apparently they had rather sad cases where children were born with male and female sexual organs but the parents had to pick a gender for their kid right away and then the babies were operated on and raised according to the gender they were assigned. Some of these kids became unhappy and depressed and always felt they had the wrong gender, so they want to avoid such situations with the new law. Wait and see until the children themselves take on a gender identity.

[Mela99]

That's surprising. I thought Germany had a pretty hard policy on names and babies and whatnot - you have to pick names that are immediately identifiable as male or female.

[Cran]

That's true for names, many names acceptable in the US can't be given to children here, but if the child HAS no identifiable sex, the situation is a bit different.

But yeah, how WILL they name such a child? Perhaps a name that can be identified as either male or female later on, like Kim, which can be a male name if a second name is given (Kim Alexander was one of my classmates in primary school. Poor guy. Ears like an elephant.).