Nepal to issue citizenship certificates to third gender, rights activists hail decision – The Washington Post

I’ve been thinking about this all day, more or less.

First thing, I love that the activists in that country have succeeded so marvellously in attaining their goals. it is a serious fucking triumph and one i find super inspiring.

i’ve also been thinknig about the larger global impact of this. because, often for travel and tourism, airlines will ask you to designate one of two binary genders. and, certainly, in canada you can be denied entry if your documented gender doesn’t match your presentation, based on whatever cissexist norms the airport person is operating with at the time.

so. how are they going to deal with this? or how will they deal with the Intersex australians who have an X on their documents?*

all in all, this is a great development ‘cause eventually other countries are going to need to put policies in place to deal with these people. becasue, short of doing some sort of really invasive examination, there is really no way they’ll be able to decide which binary gender is best suited for the individual. or they’ll have to arbitrarily assign one and i can see all sorts of shit happening with this. and this day is coming. you can be sure that sometime, in the next few years, there will be law suits or news stories talking about how an austrialian or Nepalese person has experienced serious discrimination because other countries won’t recognize their gender.

• looking at the australian X i’m suddenly a lot less impressed that it is for Intersex people only. and this throws into relief certain things i’ve read about the australian intersex community and some of the other things i’ve heard about INtersex activism.