wrongly designed vehicle.

Starting next month, new parents in Germany will no longer be required to designate their newborn children as either male or female.

In an effort to be more inclusive of intersex individuals, Germany will allow parents to leave the gender box blank on their baby’s birth certificate if they so choose. The law takes effect on November 1.

With babies reportedly born without clearly determinable genitalia at a rate of 1 in every 1,500 – and many intersex individuals not exhibiting characteristics until later in life – the legislation seeks “to take the pressure off parents to commit themselves to a gender immediately after birth.”

“This will be the first time that the law acknowledges that there are human beings who are neither male nor female, or are both,” stated University of Bremen law professor Konstanze Plett. “People who do not fit into the traditional legal categories… We will have fellow human beings with no sex registered. They can’t be forced into either one of the traditional sexes in these other contexts.”

Earlier this year, the United Nations condemned “normalization” surgery, citing research that surgeries aiming to create an either anatomically male or female bodyfor intersex infants often leads to more harm than help.

The German law reportedly states that if a child “cannot be assigned to the female nor the male gender,” their status “shall be entered without such information in the register of births.”