New York City now allows residents to select a third gender of X on their birth certificates

• As of January 1 of this year, transgender and gender non-conforming New Yorkers will only need a notarized affidavit to change their birth certificates
• New York City joins four states, Oregon, California, Washington and New Jersey, in offering non-binary gender options

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As of the first day of 2019, New Yorkers now have the option of selecting neither male or female on birth certificates in New York City.

Parents had already been able to select 'undetermined' or 'unknown' for newborns, but the new measure would allow adults to select 'X' on their own birth certificates.

According to the NYC Health website, transgender and gender non-binary New Yorkers will only need a notarized affidavit to affirm their gender identity for the change to the documentation.   

'Transgender and gender non-conforming New Yorkers deserve the right to choose how they identify and to live with respect and dignity,' said Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, said of the changes. 'This bold new policy advances the fight for equality and makes our City fairer for all people.'

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What's your opinion on so-called 'Gener X'? Is there really more than two genders or can you simply pick whatever gender you want to be depending on how you feel? Is it a mental health disorder?

Im not sure what to think, I wonder if eventually there are no males or females, we could all be X

That feeling when medical documents become social networking profiles

That feeling when medical documents become social networking profiles

This.

I don't care what pronoun people want to use, but what about medical forms and identity issues and theft? 

I want it. X sounds cool af.

So this is what happens when a meme goes too far.
Utterly silly. If you have male bits then you're a dude, if you have female bits then you're a chick.
If you do the swap of said bits then you're w/e bits and your apparent personality deems you are, but not X.

The only experiences I've had when it comes to transgender folk is when I work the doors.
When checking ID we check their sex if they think they're the opposite sex. We do this so men with bits that think they're female don't go into the girls bogs, and vice versa.
Will they need to make an X bathroom in NY with a urinal and a shitter and a tampon dispenser and a condom machine and fuck it a slot machine to go a log with it also?

So this is what happens when a meme goes too far.
Utterly silly. If you have male bits then you're a dude, if you have female bits then you're a chick.
If you do the swap of said bits then you're w/e bits and your apparent personality deems you are, but not X.

Well... To be fair I don't agree with this. If someone has male parts but feels like a chick you should accept it. Because not everyone has the money for t a surgery (same way around, if someone has female parts but feels like a dude).

In my opinion everyone should be able to use the pronounces that they feel the most comfortable at.

Im all for transgender individuals, but I don't understand this gender non binary/conforming stuff. That side seems more like a political statement rather than anything to do with identity.

But each to their own. As long as people can be happy what does it matter.

This is a good thing imo. Germany has recently adopted similar and you can now have an 'I' as your gender on a German passport, meaning intersex.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/germany-intersex-third-gender-identity-passport-lgbt-rights-a8706696.html

I'm torn on this issue.

I've spoken with professors at my university and old university about gender being on a scale rather than simply male or female. I've also spoken with them regarding gender as a social construct. From what I've heard, it's difficult to comprehend but I think I understand it. The reason we have such a problem with distinguishing between "sex" and "gender" is because we use the exact same terminology for both - "male" and "female." But if we had different terminology for gender that separates it as an entity outside of sex, then we could comprehend the idea of people having a range of different genders.

Gender, by this reasoning, is the makeup of masculinity/feminity, clothes, hairstyles, speaking patterns, mannerisms, etc. that make up an individual. So, by using different terms other than "male" and "female" to describe the accumulation of these characteristics of a person, we could see how someone with a penis may have more feminine characteristics (such as wearing women's clothes, feeling more comfortable in our visualization of a typical "woman," psychologically identification, etc.) could be called something other than "male" or may feel comfortable or as though they can identify in a wide range of different "categories" which is when you hear someone identify is "gender fluid." This is why society came up with terms like "cis" to counter "trans" in order to help the understanding of the terminology being used, even though I still think that those terms don't help describe the social dynamics of the situation and how big of a part that language plays. We can only visualize and comprehend things that we have words for, so if we don't have wording or terminology for something, we can't imagine or comprehend it. Because the same terms, male and female, have been used for as long as we can remember, with no other terminology really being developed to challenge our standard way of thinking, we're limited to our perception of the association of gender and sex.

It's really hard to explain over messaging. I remember having a conversation with @Only Lilly about it on Discord before and I even struggled with it then but I think I can be a little better at it via voice. It's still a struggle and you have to come to a conversation about it COMPLETELY open-minded.

Anyways... I think the option was added simply so that the child doesn't feel that they are "forced" to feel as though they are the gender that they are assigned at birth without knowing what they interests, characteristics, and psychological development will be later on.

The world is slowly becoming even more dumb than it is.

The article is designed to implement adult decisions onto a newborn child that all it knows is how to cry, eat, sleep and poop.

Let babies be babies, grow and develop who they want to be in their own time, allow them a childhood, but give them the tools to make their own gender decisions later on in life, rather than shove complex labels onto them from the moment theyre born.

~Mudds

The article is designed to implement adult decisions onto a newborn child that all it knows is how to cry, eat, sleep and poop.

Let babies be babies, grow and develop who they want to be in their own time, allow them a childhood, but give them the tools to make their own gender decisions later on in life, rather than shove complex labels onto them from the moment theyre born.

~Mudds

If the gender X decision on the birth certificate is made just to delay the decision of gender and wait for the kid to make the decision themselves when they're adults, I'm fine with it. But I'm afraid parents who make this type of decision will do things a lot less reasonable, like hormone therapy or sex change operations on their kids still going through puberty. Childhood is a time when people rapidly change and I think society has a responsibility not to act as oversight.

Gender X on a birth certificate makes sense beyond the transgender conversation. XXY, XYY, and other genetic sex problems such as underdeveloped sex organs are not super rare.

I agree a lot with Powerless as well that sex is genetic, but gender is largely politics and social norms. In an imaginary world where men and women have very similar physical characteristics and dress the same and all that, asking someone to treat you as a female if you're a male doesn't make much sense. It's not that simple since a lot of norms have their roots in real physical and behavioral differences between males and females, but for me thinking of gender as political makes it easier to understand these discussions.

@Powerless you shouldn't sell yourself short. I found your post to be perfectly coherent and I didn't have any difficulty grasping what it was that you were trying to say. That said, I do have some dissenting views on some of the ideas that you presented in your post as well.

Part of what I view some of the tension surrounding the topic as stemming from is also related to terminology, but I feel like I have a slightly different take on it than you do. First and foremost, male and female and not gendered words. Dictionary definitions for both denote sex; not gender. Admittedly, from a linguistic standpoint, 'gender' has become a complicated term to distinguish from sex because modifications have been made to the definition of the word itself to accommodate the overwhelming number of people that misuse it. As a simpler illustration of this trend, the definition of the word 'literally' has been modified to include exaggeration so that statements like "My mouth is literally on fire." are technically accurate when a person is eating spicy food, where previously there would have to actually be flames coming out of the person's mouth. This does not, however, make the statement literal anymore than interchangeably using two loosely related terms - sex and gender - makes them the same.

The reason I went out of my way to give that long-winded explanation is because I don't feel like anyone is assigned an actual gender at birth; they're assigned a sex. Even looking at the definition of 'transgender' indicates that the individual in question's gender identity differs from the sex that they were identified as at birth. In this regard, I have to agree with @Gazzy and disagree with @cahaya . If you have male genitals, you're a male. If you have female genitals, you're a female. That isn't a social construct; it's anatomy.

I will concede @cahaya 's point regarding being respectful to a person whose gender identity does not line up with their anatomy, but I think we have differences of opinion on what being respectful amounts to in that case. I do not feel that an unwillingness to bend to an attempt at mandatory behavior modification (the notion that we should use a person's preferred pronouns) is disrespectful. 'He' and 'she' both contain the sex terms male and female in their definitions, so calling someone that has the corresponding genitals 'he' or 'she' is accurate. This would effectively be the same as saying it's disrespectful to accurately distinguish between any two things, be it red and blue, cats and dogs, cars and trucks, etc.

I will agree that gender is more of a spectrum than a binary, but even doing so takes some legitimacy out of the argument itself. To say that gender is on a spectrum of masculine and feminine - and that everybody falls somewhere on the spectrum - would essentially mean that no two people have the exact same gender. So for people to be 'respectful' in that case, one would have to hypothetically be willing to learn all 7.5b+ sets of 'gendered pronouns' for the people on Earth if they were able to meet all of them. In the same breath though, if over the course of meeting all of those people you receive billions of 'he' and 'she' responses (although, again, I would argue those are not gendered pronouns), given the aforementioned fact that no two people will be at the exact same point on the spectrum, shouldn't everyone have different/unique pronouns that satisfy their placement on the spectrum? The logical answer is "Of course not.", but the functional answer in a spectrum-based reality is "Yes, they should."...

This is what makes a fair number of gender theorists question whether gender 'actually' exists. If it does, how do we feasibly allow for the infinite number of possibilities to be reflected in our language in a meaningful way? If it doesn't, what are we (not just 'we' on this thread, but the larger 'we' of society) arguing about? I don't know... It's a lot.