EFU Census

[xXCrystal_Rose]

People whom are still inbetween and have not come to terms with who they are as a person or their self identity yet.

[chezcaliente]

What i don't understand is what the "confused" option is for.. either you got a penis, a vagina or you had either and changed it through surgert. Male, female and trasgreder cover thouse. What's "Confused" for?

Since I studied some of this stuff at uni, let me share:

1) Sex and gender are not the same thing from an academic perspective. Sex is biological (chromosomes, genitalia, hormones), gender is social role and is culturally specific (interacting with society as a woman or a man or something else).

2) From a biological perspective: There is such a thing as intersex, and it is a biological state where not all sex determinants are concordant or are ambiguous. Eg. Male chromosomes with female genitalia, or indeterminate genitalia at birth. Various intersexed conditions affect roughly 1% of the population.

3) Transgender usually relates to social performance of gender. This is more to do with self-identification than with biology. Someone who is biologically female but lives and identifies as a man might consider themselves transgender. Then again, they might just identify as a man.

4) Transsexual usually relates to someone who has undergone or is undergoing biological sex reassignment through surgery and/or hormone therapy.

5) Some non-Western societies already have a third gender that some people are either born into because they are intersexed, or because they grow up identifying as them. The Hijra of subcontinental Asia are a good example of this.

I realise this is all very academic for about 95% of the population. But it is quite important to recognise and value people's identities if you believe in any kind of positive humanist freedom of identification.