Aussie Passports Get a Third Gender: X

Australians applying for new passports now have three gender options to choose from: Male, female, or "X." The government says the option for indeterminate gender has been added to remove discrimination against transgender people, some of whom had faced questioning and detention at airports, the AP reports. Applicants will be allowed to list their gender as X if they can provide a doctor's statement supporting the choice.

"'X' is really quite important because there are people who are indeed genetically ambiguous and were probably arbitrarily assigned as one sex or the other at birth," says lawmaker Louise Pratt, whose partner was born female and is now identified as a male. "It's a really important recognition of people's human rights that if they choose to have their sex as 'indeterminate,' that they can." (More transsexual stories.)