Nepal to Issue Passports for Third Gender

Here’s your WTF news of the day.

Nepal is a small (497 mi long and 124 mi wide), poor ($743 per capita GDP) country of 27 million people in the Himalayas, wedged between China and India.

But the Nepalese government is adding a third gender category to its passports.

Gopal Sharma reports for Reuters, Jan. 7, 2015, that Nepal will issue passports to sexual minorities, adding a third gender category, an official said on Wednesday in a sign of the conservative Hindu-majority country becoming more liberal since the end of a decade-long civil war.

“We have changed the passport regulations and will add a third category of gender for those people who do not want to be identified as male or female,” Lok Bahadur Thapa, chief of the government’s passport department, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The Himalayan nation’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people are identified as either male or female in passports, despite a 2007 Supreme Court ruling ordering authorities to amend laws to include a third gender.

Nepal joins a handful of countries that recognize a third gender: citizens of Australia and New Zealand can choose from three genders for their passports – male female or indeterminate, marked by an “x” in the passport.

India’s Supreme Court last year recognized the third gender, which lawyers say would apply to all identity documents, including a birth certificate, passport and driving license.

In Nepal, activists said the third gender recognition on passports would help tackle widespread discrimination against the country’s sexual minorities. Pinky Gurund, the transgender (man to woman) founder and head of Blue Diamond Society, a leading gay rights group in Nepal, said, “It is a very progressive move, and we welcome it.”

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Gurung called on authorities to also amend legislation, such as inheritance laws, to include the third gender as currently inheritance rights are only awarded to either “sons” or “daughters”.

Nepal emerged from a decade of conflict against Maoist rebels in 2006, after which the country began to acknowledge the rights of the LGBT community. Today, the Maoists, who say one of the objectives of the conflict was the protection of the rights of sexual minorities, are the main opposition group in parliament.

(China’s late Chairman Mao Zedong must surely be gobsmacked in Hell.)

Same-sex marriages have taken place in public in Nepal though they still remain unrecognized by law, and gay pride parades and beauty contests have also been held in the capital Kathmandu.

However, gay sex remains illegal with a maximum sentence of one year imprisonment, and gay rights activists say the LGBT community continues to face discrimination.

Nepal is preparing its first constitution after the abolition of the 239-year-old Hindu monarchy in 2008. The charter due to be adopted this month is expected to ensure greater rights to minority groups such as the LGBT community.

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A person’s gender or sex is determined at conception by one’s chromosomes.

A female results if the sex chromosomes are identical XX; a male results if the sex chromosomes are XY. There is no chromosomal combination for transgenders. Period.

That is why psychiatrist Joseph Berger, M.D., board certified as a specialist by both the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology and the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, has stated there is no scientific basis for transgender.

In a statement against the Canadian federal government’s Bill C-279 (popularly known as the “bathroom bill”) giving special protection to transgenders, Dr. Berger stated that from a medical and scientific perspective there is no such thing as a “transgendered” person, and that terms such as “gender expression” and “gender identity” used in the bill are at the very least ambiguous, and are more an emotional appeal than a statement of objective scientific fact.

“I have read the brief put forward by those advocating special rights, and I find nothing of scientific value in it,” Dr. Berger said in his statement. “Words and phrases, such as ‘the inner space,’ are used that have no objective scientific basis. There seems to me to be no medical or scientific reason to grant any special rights or considerations to people who are unhappy with the sex they were born into, or to people who wish to dress in the clothes of the opposite sex. The so-called ‘confusion’ about their sexuality that a teenager or adult has is purely psychological. As a psychiatrist, I see no reason for people who identify themselves in these ways to have any rights or privileges different from everyone else in Canada.”

In other words, transgenderism is a psychological, not biological, disorder, which would explain why gender dysphoria (aka gender identity disorder) fluctuates over time.

Transgenderism being a psychological, not biological, disorder also means no amount of “sex reassignment” surgery can make a male with XY chromosomes into a female. “Sex reassignment” surgery is surgical mutilation. Period.

Which would explain why increasing numbers of post-op “transgenders” now regret their “sex reassignment” surgical mutilation. See “Trouble in Transtopia: Murmurs of Sex Change Regret.” (H/t FOTM’s MomOfIV and Anon)