Manager's Report

by Katherine Cummings (on behalf of Phinn Borg)

(The Gender Centre advise that this article may not be current and as such certain content, including but not limited to persons, contact details and dates may not apply. Where legal authority or medical related matters are cited, responsibility lies with the reader to obtain the most current relevant legal authority and/or medical publication.)

Phinn has been more than ordinarily occupied recently, with administrative matters and has asked me to use his usual report space to bring an unusually important and interesting development in the wonderful world of transgender to your attention, in place of his column.

This is the achievement of norrie-mAy-welby in having her Recognised Details Certificate re-issued by Births, Deaths and Marriages with the Gender line marked "Not specified". This happened in February and received world-wide attention. The Sydney Morning Herald made it front-page news and many gender-oriented blogs and newsgroups picked it up.

For those who don't know norrie (can there be such a person?) she is a tireless campaigner for all the causes she believes in and not least for those who are disadvantaged in any way by gender issues. She was born in Scotland and raised as male but went through gender affirmation as a female in her twenties. She then realised that she was neither male nor female, ceased hormone therapy and proclaimed her intention to be herself, unspecified as to gender. After obtaining medical support for this contention she was able to persuade the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages to issue a certificate with a "not specified" annotation, setting an example for the many people like her around the world.

Spokespeople as wildly disparate as Tracie O'Keefe from S.A.G.E. (Sex and Gender Education) and Nicholas Tonti-Filippini, a Catholic ethicist from the John Paul II Institute came out in support of norrie and for a while it looked as if a significant change had been made in the way Australian bureaucrats look at gender.

Alas, it took only a few days for the Attorney-General's Department to intervene and force the Registry to reverse its position and cancel the certificate, stating that 'legal advice' had shown that the "Sex not specified" annotation was illegal because the Registrar "may only issue a recognised details certificate or a new birth certificate following a change of sex in either male or female gender." Leaving aside the solecism of using a phrase like "change of sex" this decision flies in the face of a letter received by the Gender Centre some time before norrie's fine adventure, asking how to obtain the 'X' gender annotation which has been approved internationally. The answer received was to the effect that a passport could only be annotated 'X' if a birth certificate was presented annotated 'X', and that this would require evidence from doctors that the person in question was of neither male nor female sex.

Isn't that exactly what norrie had done? She consulted doctors who had provided documentation to the effect that norrie is neither male nor female. Admittedly on one hand we are talking of the annotation 'X' as opposed to a spelled-out version 'sex not specified' but I do not see any significant difference. Clearly people with 'X' on their birth certificates and/or passports are not claiming to be some mysterious third X-sex. X is a conventional representation for something unspecified or unknown and the annotation X has been in use on passports in exactly this context for a number of years.

To quote from the advice given to passport applicants by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade:

Passports and the biographical details they contain are regulated by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (I.C.A.O.) to ensure a standard approach world-wide. Sex is one of four mandatory personal identifiers contained in the passport and Australia, as a member of I.C.A.O. complies with the I.C.A.O. standard that the sex data field on the travel document must be completed with the letter M for male, F for female or X for unspecified.

It appears on these grounds that norrie has fulfilled the requirements for an 'X' or an 'Unspecified' and the bureaucrats are making difficulties that do not exist. Serve them right for seeking legal advice instead of using common sense.

norrie, of course, is not taking anything lying down. A short telephone interview a few minutes ago revealed that she has not only appealed to the Human Rights Commission but has already received active support from many A.L.P. branches, from Lee Rhiannon, from Clover Moore, from Georgina Beyer (who is lobbying Helen Clarke), from Gordon Moyes and many others. Way to go, norrie!

Polare is published in Australia by The Gender Centre Inc. which is funded by the Department of Community Services under the S.A.A.P. Program and supported by the N.S.W. Health Department through the AIDS and Infectious Diseases Branch. Polare provides a forum for discussion and debate on gender issues. Advertisers are advised that all advertising is their responsibility under the Trade Practices Act. Unsolicited contributions are welcome, though no guarantee is made by the Editor that they will be published, nor any discussion entered into. The editor reserves the right to edit such contributions without notification. Any submission which appears in Polare may be published on our internet site. Opinions expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect those of the Editor, The Gender Centre Inc.I, the Department of Community Services or the N.S.W. Department of Health.