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The highest German Court decided that it is unlawful of the Government to force people to distinguish only between male and female in their personal papers - a 3rd possibility must be made available.
An article in the German Newspaper SPIEGEL explains this further.
The Courts decision is based on the petition of a person who genetically could not be identified as male nor female but both. The ruling before was that from the very beginning an entry in the field 'sex' was required by law but the only possibilities were 'male' or 'female'.
The new ruling is that the Government has to provide for a third possibility like 'inter' or 'diverse'.
Read the full article in Spiegel
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German already has a 3rd gender
German: the language where nouns are gendered, but the noun for "girl" isn't feminine. Or masculine. It is grammatically gendered as "neuter" (das Mädchen).
Don't get your hopes up: the word for "boy" (der Junge) is indeed masculine.
German law
Germany's initial changes were seen as a good thing, but I then investigated as part of my work on intersex and was profoundly shocked. For years, they have had an 'unclassified' option on birth certificates for those with ambiguous genitalia, but while it was trumpeted as allowing gender identity to be established it was actually an imposed rule. Germany, at the moment, does thousands of 'gender correction' surgeries, where infant genitalia is chopped and changed to fit preconceptions. They have just finished settling a huge lawsuit for a woman who was assigned male and then effectively brainwashed into agreeing to have what turned out to be an entire and functional set of female internal organs removed.
This new system smells like a reaction to that case, but if it follows the same path as the earlier law, it won't be an option but an imposition.
Watching it carefully at the moment.