Germany will let parents leave gender boxes blank on birth certifcates

Starting Nov. 1, Germany will become the world’s first country allowing parents to not choose a gender on their newborns’ birth certificates, The Huffington Post reports.

The German law aims to recognize intersex individuals and newborns without clearly determinable genitalia, in the hopes of easing the pressure for parents to determine a gender immediately at birth, and avoid making the wrong decision in this early time.

“This will be the first time that the law acknowledges that there are human beings who are neither male nor female, or are both,” said University of Bremen law professor Konstanze Plettt to the Agence France-Presse.

The law likely will not stop all normalization surgeries, which were condemned by the United Nations earlier this year, but it is a big step forward for intersex rights.

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