The legal recognition of new gender identities will further distance marriage from the natural family unit.

Gender beyond the binary: 

implications for marriage

by Barend Vlaardingerbroek

A binary classification is one in which there are two, and only two, states in which a given entity may exist. Sex has long been such an entity, the two states in which it may be manifested being male and female. Nature occasionally presents us with individuals who do not fit in well with the binary schema in the form of genetic anomalies and morphogenetic quirks resulting in indeterminate sexual appearance; the standard response has been hormonal treatment and/or corrective surgery to assign such individuals to one of the two members of the binary set.

Traditionally, marriage was restricted to partners of opposite sexes as determined by the sex on their birth certificates. The binary system was tested by people who underwent ‘gender reassignment’: someone born one sex who, through medical interventions, changed his or her body to conform to the image of that of the opposite sex. In various Western jurisdictions, these people have been given the thumbs-up to marry someone of the sex opposite to that to which they have been reassigned following the legal recognition of their new sex through the changing of the birth certificate. The binary classification schema prevailed.

Same-sex marriage in itself does not throw the binary classification into a tizzy as long as we’re still talking M and F. However, there has been a move away from sex towards gender in terms of how people define their identity. Putting it simply, sex is anatomical while gender is psychological. For most of us, the distinction between sex and gender is a moot point, but there have always been people who have felt a discord between the two such as feeling like a woman in a man’s body (or the other way around), or even believing oneself to be both (or neither). With the shift towards gender and the de-emphasising of biological sex, there has been a growing acceptance of the view that ‘male’ and ‘female’ are at opposite ends of a continuum, thereby introducing arbitrariness into the conventional ‘either/or’ classification. The binary system is starting to look a bit shaky at this stage.

The kiss of death for any binary system is the recognition of a third member of that set which is distinctive rather than being ‘somewhere in between’ the two conventional categories – in the context of this discussion, a ‘third sex’ or, as it is usually called, ‘third gender’.- See more at: http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/gender_beyond_the_binary_implications_for_marriage#sthash.S8NLfRH9.dpuf

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