Summary The baby has been issued a gender unspecified health card at the request of the parent.
(Web Desk) – Authorities in Canada have issued a health card for an eight-month-old baby that does not specify the baby’s sex. The move is the first of its kind in the world and has been carried out at the request of the parent of the baby.
The parent, Kori Doty, is a non-binary transgender who identifies as neither male nor female. The baby, named Searyl Atli, has been issued with a health card that has a ‘U’ in the space where the child’s sex is normally put. The U could probably stand for unspecified or undetermined.
Kori is currently engaged in a fight to omit their child’s sex from their birth certificate as part of efforts to remove the section of gender from government documents. Kori, in an interview with CBC news said, “I m raising Searyl in such a way that until they have the sense of self and command of vocabulary to tell me who they are, I am recognising them as a baby and trying to give them all the love and support to be the most whole person that they can be outside of the restrictions that come with the boy box and the girl box.”
The province where Kori lives, British Columbia, is the first one to issue a gender non-specific entry regarding a baby’s sex on an official document. Two other Canadian provinces are currently deliberating over whether to offer the option of documents with a third non-binary category.
Kori is part of a group called the Gender-Free Coalition, which wants individuals to have the right to strip gender identification from all government documents. Kori is also part of a group of people who have put forth a case before British Columbia’s Human Rights Tribunal demanding to change their own birth certificates.
Kori believes that people who have to reassign their genders later in life would be spared a lot of stress if their sex was not specified at birth. Kory said, “When I was born, doctors looked at my genitals and made assumptions about who I would be, and those assignments followed me and followed my identification throughout my life.”
Canada, along with countries like Australia, Pakistan and Nepal, is also currently involved in designing passports with a new gender designation. Just last month, the Pakistani government issued its first third-gender passport to a transgender activist from Peshawar.
You can watch a mini-documentary on Kori Doty’s story here:
