Gender is not cut and dried at birth

I WRITE to you as a mature transgender woman, a retired medical practitioner and someone with five generations of Tasmanian roots in my patrilinear line.

I applaud Tasmanian politicians for listening to the majority of Tasmanians who support this progressive change. There is no sense at all in an identity document containing a medical statement about possible chromosomal status. The best clinicians will (rarely, to be fair) get the assessment of chromosomal gender incorrect for some of the intersex presentations at birth. The quality re- search regarding the functional neurobiology of male versus female and their typical neural processing patterns tells us those who experience gender dysphoria often have brain development that is much closer to their experienced gender than to that expected based on genitalia.

Gender is vastly more complex than external genitalia. Removing an unhelpful medical descriptor from a statistically important identity document is well overdue.

Removing an allocated-at-birth gender will not make an iota of difference to those whose identity matches their morphology. For those of us who are obliged by biology to suffer the upheaval of transition between genders, having an identity document that does not proscribe (incorrectly) a gender state is not only of great personal significance, these changes say the community is mature enough to understand gender is not cut and dried at birth, and those few of us who must change can do so with the broad support of the community.