Indeterminate Sex Marriage

By Bill Maher

You want to make a conservative’s head explode? Tell them that, now that they’ve lost the battle over same-sex marriage, the next expansion of rights will be the rights of the intersexed. As in, people who are neither male nor female. And no, I don’t mean Bruce Jenner. I mean people who are born neither male or female, but both. In much the same way as the Nissan Cube is neither an SUV or a wagon, but a combination of the two.

Australia just ruled that a third “nonspecific” gender exists, and can be used on official documents. New Zealand, Nepal, and Germany have made similar rulings. In Germany, babies of indeterminate gender – hey, it happens – can be marked as an “X” on their birth certificate.

So now that we’re beginning to recognize an official third gender, we’re going to run into the issue of marriage. Actually, first we’re going to have to come up with new pronouns. The intersexed person at the center of the Australia case likes the pronouns “xie” or “hir,” but those both sound to me like characters on Battlestar Gallactica.