Courtesy of Australia's New South Wales government, Earth has its first legally registered "Sex Not Specified" human being. The Sydney Morning Herald begins the story:
THIS Mardi Gras, Norrie received a gift that no other androgynous person in NSW has had before.
The night before the parade, the postman brought a certificate from the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages that contained neither the dreaded ''M'' nor its equally despised cousin, ''F''.
Norrie has since begun doing the rounds to have all offending records changed.
Norrie's first attempt at pronouncement was at a bank where predictably the customer's request could not be processed immediately:
Centrelink was flummoxed and had to call in computer programmers to tackle the task, but agreed to find a way.
Unflummoxing a computer system is a corporate loss but at least Norrie's bank will be ahead of the regulatory curve. In related market news, Forms-R-Us-type shareholders can look forward to profits as the new paradigm takes form.
Speaking of prophets, one was consulted for the Norrie story:
A Catholic ethicist, Nicholas Tonti-Filippini from the John Paul II Institute, said birth certificates should also record no gender in such cases, updated with ''any changes to phenotypic gender''.
He said there was a trend against the practice of selecting a sex for intersex children, which could mean more androgynous people in future.
We may proceed confidently with full knowledge of the approximate location of God's stance on the matter. While the rest of us are prompted go forward with a new understanding, Norrie advises caution:
''It's not a detail I think should be part of my identity,'' neither he nor she said. (Norrie prefers ''zie''.)
Wiki is already there with the "zie" and all the other invented pronoun suggestions. Wiki has gone nowhere near Norrie (aka Norrie May-Welby aka norrie mAy-Welby). The SMH got lost somewhere in the "neither he nor she said" sentence. The rest of us will find our way the best we can when ze come calling.
