Generally, the state recognises people as Male or Female, or as men or women. It's on birth certificates, passports, all this kind of thing.
There's been progress in cases where people assigned female at birth have been granted the right to have their true gender as male recognised on government documents, or vice versa. In some countries this is becoming standard practice, although there are still often problems and restrictions.
Some jurisdictions have also (or alternatively) begun to legally recognise third genders, or people being of nonbinary gender more broadly.
This is something that's going to become a more prominent issue as time goes on.
What I wonder is, why do we need the state to recognise our gender at all? Rather than go through the complexity of changing one's official gender identity as you develop, of recognising more and more genders, however things turn out, wouldn't it be much easier to simply not recognise gender at all in identification and other documentation? Am I missing some reason why this is useful?
In practice, it's likely that we'll go down the complex route, because it can be reached by incremental change, but theoretically speaking...
There's been progress in cases where people assigned female at birth have been granted the right to have their true gender as male recognised on government documents, or vice versa. In some countries this is becoming standard practice, although there are still often problems and restrictions.
Some jurisdictions have also (or alternatively) begun to legally recognise third genders, or people being of nonbinary gender more broadly.
This is something that's going to become a more prominent issue as time goes on.
What I wonder is, why do we need the state to recognise our gender at all? Rather than go through the complexity of changing one's official gender identity as you develop, of recognising more and more genders, however things turn out, wouldn't it be much easier to simply not recognise gender at all in identification and other documentation? Am I missing some reason why this is useful?
In practice, it's likely that we'll go down the complex route, because it can be reached by incremental change, but theoretically speaking...