Gender not an issue

It’s not every day a Redfern resident gets world attention – from Britain’s BBC to America’s Time magazine, a google search shows reports in a dozen languages – but this is what has happened to Norrie May-Welby, trumpeted as the first officially recognised person not to have a sex.

Norrie, 48, was born male and underwent ‘sex-change’ surgery 20 years ago. A female appearance was achieved by taking female hormones but Norrie stopped taking them. With no additional hormones, Norrie reverted to an androgynous body.

Applying to the NSW Department of Births, Marriages and Deaths for a ‘Recognised Details Certificate,’ medical evidence was submitted stating that Norrie was not typically male or female in hormones, appearance or self-identity.  Based on this evidence, the Department wrote ‘no sex specified’ on the certificate.

The global publicity – ‘the world’s first officially genderless person’ said the Huffington Post – was replaced by a second round of coverage, when the Department withdrew its ‘no sex specified’ certificate, saying it was a legal mistake.  An appeal against that decision is being heard on May 4 at the Sydney office of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.

“The concepts of man or woman don’t fit me,” Norrie says. “The simplest solution is not to have any sex identification.”

And so Norrie tried to get the paperwork sorted out for very practical reasons.

“If my passport, for example, states that I am female, I may be detained when travelling if the local jurisdiction classes me based on the gender assigned at birth, or if my physically noticeable masculine aspects (for example, my Adam’s apple, or my broad chest) are noticed.  If the passport states male, again there is a dissonance with my physical form,” Norrie told the City Hub.

“Stating my sex as male or as female makes the statement false, which is not acceptable for legal identity documentation.”
Norrie’s fight with bureaucracy has come at just the right time to spark global interest. Perhaps the ability to be neuter or to change gender on Internet chat rooms has softened millions of people to think of their own gender identity with more flexibility.

Web pages in support of Norrie have thousands of members and the comment sections of online newspapers are bursting with excited discussion. Although there has been sober analysis of the issue for a while – the Australian Human Rights Commission recommended that adults be allowed to opt for a non-specific gender on official documents in a report released last year – Norrie’s certificate has been the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings to cause a tornado elsewhere.

Norrie’s personal choice of neuter links into the discussion of babies born with ambiguous genitalia. This can come in many varieties but often in the form of female external genitals but with a penis-like clitoris. In the past such children were not touched – any surgery would result in death through blood loss or infection – but more recent advanced surgical techniques allowed for such genitals to be ‘corrected.’

After decades of criticism, there has been a move towards leaving the baby’s genitals alone, with any medical intervention performed in adulthood.  Some decide to have no surgery, retaining ambiguous genitals.

If such a person refuses to choose a gender, how does the government classify them?

Norrie suggests many doctors specialising in this area make a mistake when they presume “that everyone has a real gender identity at the core of their being, whether or not this is congruent with their anatomy.  Even children biologically hermaphrodite are supposed to be ‘really’ of one gender, with the surgically discarded sex declared the ‘false’ one.”

That thinking does not work for some people.

“I have always been androgynous,” Norrie says with a smile. “After all, it happens to all of us: we start off as children being androgynous, there’s a wide differentiation at puberty, and then as we get older, old men look more like old women and old women like old men.

“Many have never thought of there being possibilities other than being male or female, but there are also many who support the right of each human to express themselves honestly, who would allow children to be who they are, without disciplining them to conform to gender stereotypes.

“It would be good if people could deal with me as an adult, without having to be sure what form my genitals are or what history they have or what I do with them in private.”

– By Dale Mills