Canadian Baby Issued Gender-Free Health Card; Franklin Graham Calls It 'Nonsense'
A baby in Canada was given a health card without a gender designation, supposedly making it the world's first gender-free baby. U.S. evangelist Franklin Graham has denounced as "nonsense" the parent's argument that it's a human rights violation to assign a sex to the child.
"This Canadian parent believes that assigning a child's sex at birth is a human rights violation — and they wanted their baby to be registered as 'gender unknown' so they can decide their own sex. That's nonsense," Graham wrote in a Facebook post on Wednesday.
The story concerns Searyl Atli Doty, born in British Columbia, who is now 8 months old. Campaign group Gender Free I.D. Coalition, whose goal is to "remove all gender/sex designations from identity documents," said that the child was born "outside of the medical system" and did not undergo a genital inspection at birth.
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Searyl's parent, Kori Doty who is a "non-binary genderqueer trans person," insisted that the child does not need to be assigned a gender.
"It is up to Searyl to decide how they identify, when they are old enough to develop their own gender identity," Doty said in a statement. "I am not going to foreclose their choices based on an arbitrary assignment of gender at birth based on an inspection of their genitals."
Doty further argued that assigning a gender at birth "is a violation of a child's human rights to freely express their gender identity," according to CBC
Searyl, who was reportedly born in November 2016, was issued a health card in April with the gender listed as "U."
The coalition suggested that "U" stands for "unspecified or unknown" and that Searyl is the first child to be registered in such a way.
Doty said that the decision for the child was made partly based on personal experiences.
"When I was born, doctors looked at my genitals and made assumptions about who I would be, and those assignments followed me and followed my identification throughout my life," Doty told CBC.
"Those assumptions were incorrect, and I ended up having to do a lot of adjustments since then."
CNN noted that health care cards entitle Canadians to use public health care services, though Doty is also petitioning for the child to be issued a birth certificate without a gender designation.
Doty has applied for a judicial review, claiming that the requirement of a gender marker on birth certificates violates a baby's rights.
Graham argued in his response that the only way for a person to ever be complete is by "trusting Jesus Christ, the Son of God, as our Lord and Savior."
"The Bible says we can be 'complete in Him.' He fills the void in our hearts, and can give us the 'peace of God which surpasses all understanding,'" he stated.
There has been a strong legislative push in Canada to embrace transgenderism.
Last month, Canada's Ontario province passed legislation that allows the government to seize children from families that refuse to accept their child's chosen "gender identity" or "gender expression."
Also in June, the nation's Senate passed a law against the use of wrong gender pronouns, with hate crimes of the nature potentially leading to fines and imprisonment.
Critics, such as Jack Fonseca of the Campaign Life Coalition, condemned the move, calling it "tyrannical."
"Mark my words, this law will not be used as some sort of 'shield' to defend vulnerable transsexuals, but rather as a weapon with which to bludgeon people of faith and free-thinking Canadians who refuse to deny truth," Fonseca argued.
