A biological storm is brewing over the West's genderless future

A COUPLE of weeks ago we were treated to a strange and startling story on the front page of this newspaper. A couple in Ontario, Canada, decided to rear their child as "genderless".

Ironically, the unfortunate infant subject of this bizarre experiment has been given the name Storm. The parents' decision has not, in this country, been seriously discussed and is easily dismissed as the post-partum politically correct zeal of new parents.

However, to dismiss it would be equally silly. It is no accident that this has happened in Canada. The former home of the lumberjacks is a hotbed of crazy minority gender politics, and its ultra-liberal approach to gay marriage and other sexual issues made it a template for lobby groups in other Western parliamentary democracies -- Australia being one.

Province by province the laws have been changed and terminology altered to incorporate the gay political agenda into the human rights agenda. This is very similar to the human rights tactics that are being used in Australia to push gay marriage bills such as the state human rights bills and charters. The latest tactical manifestation is the introduction of the Greens-supported Territories bill.

Canada has been in the forefront of this incrementalism. So, for example, partly to accommodate gay parenting in most provinces, with the backing of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, the notion of parental gender has become redundant. Quebec was one of the first places where parents were not permitted to be identified on school records as mother or father but as parent A or parent B. Other provinces followed suit. But that is nothing to the legislative havoc wrought by the 2005 Civil Marriage Act that legalised gay marriage in Canada and provided that the term "natural parent" be replaced by "legal parent" in certain legislation.

Baby Storm could be a rainbow warrior of the future. With the advent of gay marriage, the Canadians have accepted the idea of "genderless" parenting, so how strange is it to make the leap to genderless children? In fact, how long before we are all genderless? How far have we come already to instituting a social order that tries to suppress the natural duality of biologically determined sex ?

Recently Canada tried to go even further in that direction, with the passage in the House of Representatives of controversial bill C389.The bill died with the election, but, with the backing of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, it proposed to add to the list of things to be protected by the Canadian anti-discrimination and human rights laws gender identity and expression. This bill would have provided Canada with far-reaching laws for transsexual and transgender rights. We have laws protecting such people in Australia. British Columbia's Human Rights Commission cited our laws when considering this issue

However, C389's critics have pointed out that rather than extending human rights, the bill would only have added to the confusion surrounding human rights and possibly impinged upon the sex discrimination laws (aimed at women) already in place.

Douglas Farrow, professor of Christian Thought at Montreal's McGill University, has pointed out that since sex is biologically determined, overturning that binary logic to include transsex and transgender people, who regard sex as a fluid social construct, may have consequences for the rights of women: "The word sex in our codes specifies the division of the species into male and female with a view to protecting the latter especially."

Heartless right-wing wags dubbed the bill (along with a similar bill in Massachusetts) the "bathroom bills" because of the obvious problems associated with transsexual and transgender people. This may be drawing a long bow, but what is a very short bow are other more complex, delicate problems, which have started to crop up across the West, including Australia.

There are all sorts of new and complicated rules for the public and for schools, business and government. That is why new interpretive institutions are springing up, such as the scarily named GenderKompetenzcentrum at the University of Berlin.

Farrow has pointed out that the addition of "sexual orientation" into the human-rights catalogue has basically effected a transformation in our thinking about human sexuality. "Male and female have begun to give way to homosexual and heterosexual in the basic binary logic of sex . . . hence gay marriage".

But the next step is more fundamental: "The addition of gender identity and expression carries the transformation even further by suppressing the binary logic (of sex) itself." In other words, a genderless world.

Backers of bills like C389 make no attempt to disguise their extreme genderless world view. Hence this statement from the Canadian Labor Congress, quoted by the Ontario Human Rights Commission: "One of the great myths of our culture is that at birth each infant can be identified as distinctly 'male' or 'female' (biological sex), will grow up to have correspondingly 'masculine' or 'feminine' behaviour (public gender), live as a man or a woman (social gender) and marry a woman or a man (heterosexual affective orientation). That is not so."

Phew. "But surely," you are thinking, "serious men and women cannot believe this . . . well . . . crap?" Think again, dear reader.

In 2008, I was asked to appear on the ABC's Q&A show, on the day Pope Benedict arrived in Sydney for World Youth Day. I found myself the lone apologist for the Catholic view on sex. I was asked a rather arch Dorothy Dixer on the Pope's view of homosexuals.

I was not surprised by the young audience's ignorance about Catholic teaching on sexual morality; that is very common. What did surprise me was that as

I prefaced my answer with the simple declarative statement that we are all born male or female, I was booed.

Now, if one cannot begin to discuss sex with a statement of simple biology, then really, it does seems that baby Storm may indeed be a pioneer in his/her time, a rainbow warrior of the future.