In what could be a world first, an eight-month-old Canadian baby has been issued a health card without gender noted.
The baby's parent Kori Doty – a non-binary transgender person who identifies as neither male or female, wants to let the baby discover their own gender.
Where it would usually have an "F" or "M" under the "sex" heading, instead there is a "U", which could stand for undetermined, or unassigned.
Kori is also currently fighting to have the baby's sex taken off the birth certificate. They (Kori's preferred pronoun) gave birth to Searyl Atli in November, and says that the sex organs the baby has at birth cannot determine what gender that person will have, or identify with, later in life.
Kori wants to keep Searyl's sex off all records.
"I'm raising Searyl in such a way that until they have the sense of self and command of vocabulary to tell me who they are, I'm recognising them as a baby and trying to give them all the love and support to be the most whole person that they can be outside of the restrictions that come with the boy box or the girl box," Kori told CBC.
Kori is a community educator, and part of the Gender-Free ID Coalition. They said people who don't identify with the gender they were assigned at birth face a raft of problems later in life trying to change their documentation.
"When I was born, doctors looked at my genitals and made assumptions about who I would be, and those assignments followed me and followed my identification throughout my life," Kori said. "Those assumptions were incorrect, and I ended up having to do a lot of adjustments since then."
The family's lawyer, barbara findlay (who chooses to spell her name without capital letters), told Global News, "The assignment of sex in this culture is done when a medical person lifts up the legs and looks at the baby's genitals. But we know that the baby's own gender identity will not develop for some years until after they're born."
Kori says that so far, authorities have refused to issue Searyl's birth certificate without the baby's sex, but they have applied for a judicial review to rectify the situation.