Karlsruhe opens up the gender entry

On 8 November 2017, the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe made public a decision that fundamentally changed German civil status law. Until then, the birth register knew only "female" and "male". For intersex people, the most they could do was leave the field blank. That was not enough, the First Senate ruled. Anyone who permanently identifies as neither a woman nor a man is entitled to their own positive entry.

The complaint had been brought by an intersex person who became known as Vanja, supported by the "Dritte Option" (Third Option) campaign. The court held that the Basic Law does not require an exclusively binary regulation of gender. The legislature was given until the end of 2018 to create a further option or to dispense with the entry altogether. It opted for "divers".

That the decision was announced on this particular day was a coincidence. But 8 November has long carried a meaning of its own. It is the birthday of Herculine Barbin and is marked around the world as Intersex Day of Remembrance.

Barbin was born in 1838 in Saint-Jean-d'Angély in western France. The child grew up as a girl, attended a convent school thanks to a scholarship and became a teacher. There Herculine fell in love with a female colleague. After a medical examination, the authorities intervened, and a court declared Herculine a man. From then on the name was Abel. Barbin moved to Paris, lived in poverty and wrote down their memories. In 1868, Barbin took their own life at the age of twenty-nine.

The memoirs survived. In the seventies, the philosopher Michel Foucault republished them and made this voice accessible to a wide audience.

Almost one hundred and eighty years lie between Barbin's birth and the Karlsruhe decision. The question behind them has remained the same: who actually decides what gender a person is?