by Elizabeth M Young

Created on: November 02, 2009

When it comes to a job application, birth certificate, or any official document, an individual's gender is an important fact that must be documented and recorded. The term "sex" should be eliminated from any official requirements for vital information, since the term has a completely different set of meanings than was originally intended. Today, the word "sex" can have many meanings, and can refer to many communities in ways that have nothing to do with proving physical identity, just as individual religious beliefs, political party, or college affiliation have little to do with the basics of identity.

And there are two genders, plus unresolved hermaphroditic conditions, that allow identification of a particular animal or human. For official documents, there should not be a third gender that incorporates facts that are not the basic physical fact about an individual. From the official documents that register our pets, to the documents that register our own identities as human beings who are complex medical, official, and legal entities, our issues with "sex" are not necessarily anyone's business, unless we are registered sex offenders who, along with convicted felons, are permanently put under special conditions of official mistrust.

In other words, there is a need to record important and limited social and physical facts in order to insure that we are who our documents say that we are, where we are legally entitled to citizenship, our race, whether we are male or female, who is our next of kin, and what we are as medical entities.

What broad religious faith we practice in the event that we require specific rituals of death, or whether we have special religious beliefs that affect our preferences in medical care is supplemental information that can be maintained on emergency notification cards and in medical or other records.

A third "sex" that is intended to identify gay and lesbian individuals is the same supplemental type of information. A person's sexual preference, orientation, or compulsion is an important, but supplemental social matter, but has nothing to do with the basic and required legal, medical, or civil facts about all persons, any more than their political party or what college they attended matters.

Just as with individual variations in religious practice, specific ethnicity, or political orientation, the issue also becomes an issue of the demands of each and every gay or lesbian individual, where there are a host of subjective subcategories of the gay and lesbian community. This involves the ways in which each and every person chooses to live their lives and to identify themselves as social entities. These are complex, overwhelming, and completely irrelevant to basic official data collection requirements.

Such information can be maintained for emergency purposes as everyone else does when they want specific and individual information known: in supplemental information that is maintained in the wallet.

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