Today, the first ever gender neutral passport has been issued to the 57-year-old Leonne Zeegers of Breda, Noord-Brabant. Instead of having a ‘v’ (‘vrouw’ = woman) or ‘m’ (‘man’, same as in English) in their passport, they have an ‘x’, making them the first Dutch person to have such a passport.
The issuing of this passport comes after a court decision earlier this year in Roermond, Limburg, claiming that gender was a question of gender identity and not of sex characteristics. When Leonne was born, the doctors were not able to determine with any certainty if they were a boy or a girl, and as such was an intergender person back when the term was not used as it is today. Back in the day, the parents had to pick a gender, so they went with male ‘because it was easier’. Later in life, Leonne realised they didn’t feel like a man, and switched their gender to female, but that didn’t help because they really felt like neither, a choice that didn’t exist back then.
Hopefully the move will also encourage many other Dutch instances to scrap registering gender for no actual reason than force of habit. According to Dutch interest groups, some 4 percent of the Dutch feel like Leonne does.
(Link: omroepbrabant.nl)
A two-metre-tall wooden penis was found to be insulting by a judge in Breda last Wednesday. Artist Peter de Koning of Steenbergen in Noord Brabant had made the statue to protest the way a police officer had treated his daughter. The officer had allegedly groped the girl from his car under the pretext of searching for marijuana late last year.