Gender nonconforming Americans can now choose neither male nor female on their licenses in many states

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Akiva Wolberg, who is gender nonconforming, switched to a District of Columbia driver’s license with an X gender marker two years ago. Image: Annie Tritt/Wall Street Journal

A growing number of states and companies are allowing people to designate their gender as “X” instead of male or female on driver’s licenses and other forms of identification.

The changes are a response to transgender Americans who don’t identify as exclusively male or female and others who feel binary gender categories don’t accurately describe them. Two years ago, Oregon became the first state to officially accommodate such residents by allowing them to select an X in the gender field of their driver’s license to convey that their gender is nonbinary or unspecified.

[In addition,] the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency that polices workplace discrimination, told employers that they could classify workers as nonbinary when they submit pay data to the agency.

Prof. Clarke said that the legalization of same-sex marriage greatly diminished the number of legal arrangements that rely on categorizing a person as a man or a woman, leaving few legal reasons to restrict people to two gender categories. She noted that, instead of explicitly recognizing a third gender marker, some municipalities have made it optional to include any kind of sex designation on documents.

Read full, original post: For Those Who Don’t Identify as Male or Female, Growing Acceptance—and Accommodation

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