Eight-month-old Canadian Baby's Health Card may be the World's First to be Marked with Gender 'Unknown'
Kori Doty, who doesn't identify as either male or female and prefers to use the pronoun they, wants to keep baby Searyl Atli's gender off all official records, according to the CBC.
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Doty said that they are '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'm recognizing 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,' Doty told the news site.
But the fight isn't over.
Doty, who is a non-binary trans parent, has been trying to get British Columbia to issue Searyl a birth certificate without a gender marker since the child was born last November.
But the province has so far refused, despite sending Doty the child's health card with a 'U' for gender on it last month.
The 'U' is presumed to mean 'undertermined' or 'unassigned', according to CBC.
According to Doty's lawyer, the province's birth certificates only accommodate a male or female gender designation at the moment.
However, there are some provinces like Ontario that are reviewing their policies to include a third, non-binary gender option on official documents.
But the concern with the third option is that those who use it could be singled out. They could become targets of discrimination and hate crimes, according to Doty.
Doty and the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal have argued that the omission of the gender should apply to all government documents for everyone in BC and Canada.
According to Doty, feeling contrary to the gender one is assigned at birth and having to then change government documents later in life, is often a difficult process.
Doty and the human rights group argue that omitting any form of gender identification on government documents would reduce that stress, according to CBC.
'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,' Doty said.
'Those assumptions were incorrect, and I ended up having to do a lot of adjustments since then.'
Earlier this year, the province and the federal government passed bills to include 'gender identity and expression' in the Human Rights Code.