Are We Facing a Genderless Future?

[Shana A]

Are We Facing a Genderless Future?
A small but growing number of people are rejecting being labeled male or female.

by Barbara Kantrowitz and Pat Wingert
August 16, 2010

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/08/16/life-without-gender.html

This spring, an Australian named Norrie May-Welby made headlines around the world as the world's first legally genderless person when the New South Wales Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages sent the Sydney resident a certificate containing neither M for male or F for female.

For a few days, it appeared that the 48-year-old activist and performer had won a long legal battle to be declared "sex not specified"—the only category that felt right to this immigrant from Scotland. May-Welby's journey of gender identity can only be characterized as a long and winding road. Registered male at birth, May-Welby began taking female hormones at 23 and had sex-change surgery to become a woman, but now doesn't take any hormones and identifies as genderless. The prized piece of paper May-Welby sought is called a Recognised Details Certificate, and it's given to immigrants to Australia who want to record a sex change.

[Pica Pica]

Interesting quote in the comments bar.

Seems like the logical extension of clinical Narcissism.... having total control over one's identity, even down to the level of nature and gender. And what screams "incapable of empathy", more than "I can relate to no one, not even my own body"?

I think this idea of 'genderless person as self absorbed twit' is at times painfully close to the truth.

[RebeccaFog]

from that article:

Bockting predicts that such binary thinking will eventually disappear. Many scientists, he says, see gender as a continuum and acknowledge that some people naturally fall in the middle. Gender, Bockting says, "develops between the biological and the environmental. You can't always detect gender by physical evidence. You have to ask the person how they identify themselves; in that sense, it's psychological.