“A British expat who claims to have no gender is thought to have become the first person to be officially recognised as neither male or female.
Norrie May-Welby, 48, was born a man but had a sex change operation in 1990, at the age of 28.
After becoming unhappy as a woman, May-Welby decided to become a “neuter”. The 48-year-old is now officially recognised as a person of no specific gender.
May-Welby emigrated to Australia at the age of seven after being born in Paisley, Renfrewshire.
Officials there altered the Briton’s birth certificate to include the new no-gender classification after doctors were apparently unable to determine the sex of the expat’s body.”
Read more at The Telegraph (thanks, Tiram)
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I think a bit of thought needs to be spared here for all the web developers, form makers and database admins the world over.
Just think of all the web pages, paper forms, and database schema’s that now have to be updated!
The first documented (and legal) Angel~ wheee
Huh?!?
Even if he has had his external reproductive glands removed, he still has not/does not have any female attributes, such as a womb.
Totally crazy, he was born a man, unhappy as woman, so therefore shouldn’t he have the choice of choosing one, or making the doctors vote on what he is. Are we going to refer to him/her as it or thing?
I wonder how much the government had to spend to come up with this little baby, and really is it actually worth being news?
I doubt it!
Generally: Great. Welcome to the 21st century, world.
@ste daniels
Naaa, we should have kept that in mind beforehand. Same issue as with gay marriage: A good database design would cope. A nice set of examples for technical design and about social implications: http://qntm.org/gay
@Scott
Actually, the pronoun might be a slight problem. Databases are flexible enough, language a bit less…
Mr/Miss May-Welby? Is this for real?
There is a Samuel R. Delaney book that intrigued me as a hormonal teenager – it is called ‘Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand’. If I remember correctly, the protagonist had several anuses (anii?) and an extra vagina near his/her belly button. S/he was modified to be a sex worker for a rich industrialist. As medical tech advances, especially stem cell tech such as the multiple induced pluripotent cells from skin, we will see a lot of people with the money and the inclination to alter themselves or others for a whole range of reasons. We really do have a right to self-determination and that includes our choice of gender, sexuality and body shape. Economic inequality will unfortunately mean that some are altered for the fun of others with very little choice in the matter.
Surely a DNA test would confirm he is a man. I say HE and MAN because I disagree with all this nonsense. Fair enough choose to live as a man or a woman, or call yourself a cabbage if you want, but don’t cause trouble, wasting other people’s time and money trying to be different because you think your special and have a right to be recognised as such. What a loser!
There is also the important question of pronouns! We need a new set of words for neutral individuals.
The Germans are fine as they already have a neutral sex in their language (neutrum: and can create combined words – fraumann or mannfrau).
The Spanish can use the verb alone with no pronoun.
Chinese ideograms could be combined to create a man/woman ideogram with as many organs as required (added ideogrammatically).
Egyptian hieroglyphs could easily accomodate physical atypicality, and would be humourous as well!
What about toilet doors?
Political correctness gone sane!
Obviously i am joking, but the pronoun issue is important if people are to feel accepted for who or what they are (or wish to be).
ps DB can correct my German if it is wrong. If he reads this…
All im going to say about this is that he was born male therefore he is still male, even people that have a sex change are never truly the sex that they change to, so all in all it’s a massive waste of time, especially on this guy/girl/thing.
Ian: Science disagrees with you. Some people do have the brain of the opposite gender. See http://jcem.endojournals.org/cgi/content/full/85/5/2034 .
It’s not so very hard to imagine that some brains develop without a ‘gendered bit’, so to speak. As our body is pretty much just a case to carry our brains around in, that would mean those people, despite their bodily sex, are indeed genderless.
“neuter”?
Nutter..
Saying it is unnatural is illogical as it assumes that nature is static and eternal. Look up aphids (3 sexes and parthenogenetic reproduction) hermaphrochickens (we’ve all seen them on this blog) frogs spontaneously changing sex, etc. The gender state of a carbon based life form is in many cases a fluid state and many species contain other states than male or female.
It is ‘natural’ to live in a tree and eat raw veg, but I don’t wish to.
We are the agents of our own evolution.
We need to come to terms with our growing power and discuss the ethics of personal identity and human progress without getting bogged down in arguments about the comparative normality of different states of being. Surely there are more important things, like 3rd world debt?
A quick blood test would reveal X & Y chromosomes. The end.
Anything else is a state of mind
Glen: How about XY androgen insensitive females, or other intersex individuals? You can hardly call that a state of mind.
Gender neutral pronouns exist in the English Language: They, they’re, their, them, etc.
We already use them to refer to people whose gender is unknown to us, in a vague ‘them – that person’ way. It’s really not difficult to adapt to using ‘they’ when referring directly to a person as it’s grammatically fine.
To those referencing chromosomes, I’d like to point out that this is irrelevant. Gender and biological sex are two very different things. I personally, have a massive problem with the concept of gender itself and would prefer if non-gendered were a commonly recognised state. Good on May-Welby for making some progress.
it’s just pat…
You know, I would get this if the person was born an hermaphrodite or even a chimera, as far as government paperwork goes. Those cases need to be addressed anyway.
But, I also understand that this person was unhappy and physiologically has something mismatched (is that PC?) between the body and brain.
This is awesome.
The amount of ignorance here, however, is not.
I cannot believe the amount of ignorant posts that exist here already.
The piece of news however, gives me a lot of hope. I have friends who have been waiting for neutral gender, or third-gender acknowledgement for a long time.
I realise the ignorant posters will probably not read any following posts – they’ve judged and condemned, they have no more interest in the matter – but i will still reply to them.
It is important to note that gender is about how one identifies in the mind. When we talk about the body and biology, then do we talk about sex.
So, of course, it is easy for a person to be neutrally gendered. Just as people can be born intersex, so it is only the logical assumption that people can also be born with a non-binary gender. (i.e. not identifying as a man OR a woman.)
My other post should explain now why some previous posts were so ignorant. Because I use that word to truly mean that they have no idea what they’re talking about.
Saying that someone is a man because they do not have a womb and they at one point had a penis, makes no sense. Being a man is about gender-identity; having a penis is about sex.
I’d also like to reply to the non-ignorants. There are gender-neutral pronouns in use in the UK. Of course, “they” etc is one, but there are also people using “Ze” and “Zan” – Ze replacing he or she, and Zan replacing his or hers. These are taking from another language (forgive me, i don’t know which) but they are in current use – in the company of those who need to use them.
Just wanted to add my 2 cents.
There is a pronoun in Finish called Hen – a genderless pronoun. They actually lack gendered pronouns if I understand it correctly. It is becoming more and more common in Swedish to import this word tom compliment han/hon.
Also there is several different solutions to gender-neutral pronouns. One we have used is Ey (as in They minus the th-sound) to make it singular. For more info look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_pronoun
Not that I have anything against transgender individuals, but scientifically speaking, you can’t change gender. Not humans anyway. If I chop off my arms and legs, I’m not suddenly a slug, I’m still a human, and if you chop off your meat and two veg, you might not have the necessary equipment, but you are still categorically, technically, scientifically, male.
Dan, you’re confusing the terms ‘sex’ and ‘gender’. Sex is the body, gender is the brain, as well as referring to the sociological concept. Some people have brains that are more like those of the other sex, so their gender is opposite to their sex. TG individuals are merely attempting to make their ‘equipment’ suit their gender. You’d probably feel weird with a vagina, too (assuming you’r gender is male).
just a bit more info on the finnish third-person pronoun. it is in fact ‘hän’ – the ‘ä’ is pronounced kindof half-way beween english ‘a’ and ‘e’ so ‘hen’ is an easy misspelling.
Just say ‘car’, but like a scouser. there, that’s the finnish ‘ä’ right there…
hmm… actually, in the spoken finnish, they tend to say ‘se’, meaning ‘it’ – they use that for animals, too. Now I’m not only gender-neural, but I (and other animals) aren’t even specified as living or non-living… I don’t know whether to feel insulted or not! Meh, you get used to it…
this is what happens when you give people freedom to choose.
Pronouns are the only real problem.
We already have nueter ones & if anyone objects to ‘it’ then simply add an ‘e’ on the end to distinguish between living & non-living.
He, she & ite.
Him, her & herm.
His, hers & herms. (That last one’s a bit clunky I know)
Simple.