It’s now ok to deny reality in Germany.
Spiegel reports:
Germany is set to become the first country in Europe to introduce a third, “indeterminate” gender designation on birth certificates. The European Union, which is attempting to coordinate anti-discrimination efforts across member states, is lagging behind on the issue…
Under the new law, individuals can also opt to remain outside the gender binary altogether.
The baby is a boy or a girl. It doesn’t matter what the parent wants or thinks the baby should be. Some things just are. Imagine that, some things in the world don’t need your agreement. They just are.
I guess this should come as no surprise since a baby’s sex isn’t the only thing which depends on the parent’s whim. In fact, whether the baby is a baby at all or just a blob of tissue depends on the whims of the baby’s parents.
August 19, 2013 at 7:25 am
Whaddaya mean "gender", white man? That thing you're talking about is "sex", gender is a grammatical category ("noun class" is the other term). In most languages the genders/noun-classes aren't "masculine"/"feminine" (/"neuter") but "animate"/"inanimate" or "personal"/"impersonal". Some languages have lots, and do funky things with 'em—in Navajo they're "solid and round/load or burden/bunch of non-compact matter/slender flexible/slender stiff/flat flexible/mushy/collective 1/collective 2/open container/animate object"…and they don't inflect things like adjectives, but the verbs relating to motion.
I really do think the fact that in Indo-European languages "gender" relates to masculine/feminine and is somewhat arbitrary (some of the South Asian languages have masculine/feminine/neuter but the first two only apply to living things with a known sex) lends credence to this ridiculous "you can make up your own gender" idea that the white world—only—is so obsessed with right now. It's really the mother of all "first world problems".
August 19, 2013 at 2:12 pm
I agree that this "third gender" designation is probably motivated by wacky liberal ideas, and that it probably will be abused by some parents who simply don't want to declare the gender of their child for wacky liberal reasons.
However, my understanding is that a very small percentage of children actually are born with indeterminate gender. In theory, I don't see a problem with this new birth certificate designation for children born in that condition.
(Having said that, in light of modern society's confusion about what male and female mean, I agree that this is a troubling development.)
August 19, 2013 at 4:05 pm
Springtime for sissies and Germany, winter for guys and gals!
August 19, 2013 at 9:55 pm
@Paul: The very small percentage in question is actually more of a "per million" rather than "per cent" (=100). It is absolutely laughable to pretend that Germany has those conditions in mind when they do this. They pure and simple want to pretend that people may claim to be other than what their bodies say they are, because man is the master of the world and physical reality must bend to his whims.
And again, there is no such thing as "indeterminate gender". There is such a thing as indeterminate sex, although it is so rare as to make albinism look commonplace. But "gender", to the extent it's not just a misappropriated linguistic term, means "social sexual role" (which is, by the bye, always and absolutely the same for any human behavior that predates the Agricultural Revolution), and a newborn has not been socialized, therefore they have no "gender", only a physical, objective sex.
August 19, 2013 at 10:57 pm
Sophia's Favorite,
I agree that the proper word for what I was talking about is sex, and not gender. I used the word gender because that was the word used in the blog post, and I thought it would be less confusing to stay with the same terminology.
I don't greatly disagree with you on the topic of indeterminate sex. (I'll use "sex" instead of "gender" now, to be more precise.) I don't know the statistics, but you say it is a few people per million, and that sounds credible to me.
But I still stand by my original point that there is nothing inherently wrong with making an "indeterminate sex" designation available on a birth certificate form, since some people are indeed born with indeterminate sex. In fact, I think that making this designation available could actually be a good thing, because it doesn't force parents to choose male or female in those rare cases where the actual sex is not clear.
And I also stand by my original point (and agree with you) that the possible valid motivation for this change (that some people really are born with indeterminate sex) is probably not the real motivation here, at least not entirely. So again, I do find this birth certificate designation to be troubling, as I said before.