We are not blank slates for gender

Broadcast on 2CH Sydney, 16 Jun 2013

We have grown accustomed to calls for equal opportunity, racial equality, gender equality, and rightly so.  But governments and courts are now faced with demands for “transsexual equality” – the notion that identifying a person as either male or female is a denial of their right not to specify which sex they are.

This situation arose when the NSW Supreme Court ruled that a man who claims to be neither a man nor a woman could select a third category, stating “non-specific” on official documents.

The person in question, known as Norrie, was born a man, and had a sex change operation in 1990, but was unhappy living as a woman and chose to be identified as “sexless.”

Biological anomalies and psychiatric exceptions do exist, but there are good reasons why every society is made up of boys and girls, men and women, who are not at all blank slates when it comes to sex and gender.

I’m Rod Benson for the NSW Council of Churches.