A new law, which came into force today in Germany, provides that the box on a birth certificate specifying a child’s gender should be left blank in cases where the child is neither obviously male nor female. This will, an Interior Ministry spokesman explained, “take the pressure off parents to commit themselves to gender immediately after birth” – thus allowing for greater delay before drastic, life-defining and perhaps mistaken surgery is carried out on an infant too young to decide for itself what it wants to be.
Such legal acknowledgement of the existence of intersex conditions, which have been known about for all recorded history, comes surprisingly late. Germany is the first country in Europe, and only the second in the world after Australia, to pass such a law. (Australian law is in fact more advanced, allowing people a third option – designated X – on all official forms.)
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