Enquête LGBT européenne
Are We Facing a Genderless Future?
A small but growing number of people are rejecting being labeled male or female.
This spring, an Australian named Norrie May-Welby made headlines around the world as the world’s first legally genderless person when the New South Wales Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages sent the Sydney resident a certificate containing neither M for male or F for female.
For a few days, it appeared that the 48-year-old activist and performer had won a long legal battle to be declared “sex not specified”—the only category that felt right to this immigrant from Scotland. May-Welby’s journey of gender identity can only be characterized as a long and winding road. Registered male at birth, May-Welby began taking female hormones at 23 and had sex-change surgery to become a woman, but now doesn’t take any hormones and identifies as genderless. The prized piece of paper May-Welby sought is called a Recognised Details Certificate, and it’s given to immigrants to Australia who want to record a sex change.
Read full story ( PDF )
Read also:
No sex for me, please! Ex-transsexual Australian Norrie May-Welby is first legally genderless person
Briton is recognised as world’s first officially genderless person
A genderless future? That would be an ideal situation for everybody. Today gender is frequently the origin of discriminations that so many people feel it is necessary to fight. Just look around you and you will see that even the different states have set up programs to see these discriminations disappear. Some of the samples are differences in salaries between M/F, differences in access to jobs that are often gender related, differences in careers, differences in access to higher education ( it’s not so long ago that past primary education girls and boys were sent to separated schools, even schools about housekeeping, absolutely “girls only” – girl’s boarding schools still exist today, they even rise in number, nowadays ). As the story above tells us, we are far away from a genderless future. Let us have a look at gender.
Gender is a range of characteristics used to distinguish between males and females, particularly in the cases of men and women and the masculine and feminine attributes assigned to them. Depending on the context, the discriminating characteristics vary from sex to social role to gender identity. Sexologist John Money introduced the terminological distinction between biological sex and gender as a role in 1955. Before his work, it was uncommon to use the word “gender” to refer to anything but grammatical categories. However, Money’s meaning of the word did not become widespread until the 1970s, when feminist theory embraced the distinction between biological sex and the social construct of gender. Today, the distinction is strictly followed in some contexts, like feminist literature, and in documents written by organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO), but in most contexts, even in some areas of social sciences, the meaning of gender has expanded to include “sex” or even to replace the latter word. Although this gradual change in the meaning of gender can be traced to the 1980s, a small acceleration of the process in the scientific literature was observed when the Food and Drug Administration started to use “gender” instead of “sex” in 1993. “Gender” is now commonly used even to refer to the physiology of non-human animals, without any implication of social gender roles.
In the English literature, the trichotomy between biological sex, psychological gender, and social sex role first appeared in a feminist paper on transsexualism in 1978. Some cultures have specific gender-related social roles that can be considered distinct from male and female, such as the hijra of India and Pakistan.
While the social sciences sometimes approach gender as a social construct, and gender studies particularly do, research in the natural sciences investigates whether biological differences in males and females influence the development of gender in humans; both inform debate about how far biological differences influence gender identity formation.
But here we are, now and by no means at an other time. We are still living in a fully gendered world! And that is a problem for many of us, called transgender. And this binary gendered environment is not for us, as we are perceived as gender non-conformant.
Transgender (pronounced /trænzˈdʒɛndər/) is a general term applied to a variety of individuals, behaviors, and groups involving tendencies to vary from culturally conventional gender roles.
Transgender is the state of one’s “gender identity” (self-identification as woman, man, neither or both) not matching one’s “assigned sex” (identification by others as male, female or intersex based on physical/genetic sex). “Transgender” does not imply any specific form of sexual orientation; transgender people may identify as heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, pansexual, polysexual, or asexual; some may consider conventional sexual orientation labels inadequate or inapplicable to them. The precise definition for transgender remains in flux, but includes:
“Of, relating to, or designating a person whose identity does not conform unambiguously to conventional notions of male or female gender roles, but combines or moves between these.”
“People who were assigned a sex, usually at birth and based on their genitals, but who feel that this is a false or incomplete description of themselves.”
“Non-identification with, or non-presentation as, the sex (and assumed gender) one was assigned at birth.”
A transgender individual may have characteristics that are normally associated with a particular gender, identify elsewhere on the traditional gender continuum, or exist outside of it as “other”, “agender”, “Genderqueer”, or “third gender”. Transgender people may also identify as bigender, or along several places on either the traditional transgender continuum, or the more encompassing continuums which have been developed in response to the significantly more detailed studies done in recent years.
As you see, we are far away from a genderless future. We are facing a ton of problems generated by gender instead ! We would expect that at least in science fiction literature the future is genderless. Far from true, in fact. The writers go as far as to “en-gender” even the aliens.
Gender has been an important theme explored in speculative fiction. The genres that make up speculative fiction (SF)[a], science fiction, fantasy, supernatural horror and related genres (utopian literature), have always offered the opportunity for writers to explore social conventions, including gender, gender roles, and beliefs about gender. Like all literary forms, the science fiction genre reflects the popular perceptions of the eras in which individual creators were writing; and those creators’ responses to gender stereotypes and gender roles.
Many writers have chosen to write with little or no questioning of gender roles, instead effectively reflecting their own cultural gender roles onto their fictional world. However, many other writers have chosen to use science fiction and non-realistic formats in order to explore cultural conventions, particularly gender roles. This article discusses works that have explored or expanded the treatment of gender in science fiction.
In addition to the traditional human genders, science fiction has extended the idea of gender to hypothetical alien species and robots, and imagined trans-real genders, such as with aliens that are truly hermaphroditic or have a “third” gender, or robots that can change gender at will or are without gender.
Wikipedia: Gender in speculative fiction
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