Meet The Western World's First Legally Gender-Neutral Person Norrie
Norrie is a gender-neutral urban-dwelling pixie who rides hir bubble-blowing bicycle daily around Sydney, spreading good vibes. The activist, political cartoonist and all-around great person is also the first in the Western world to be recognised as neither male nor female, hir gender now listed as 'non-specific' after an April 2014 ruling by the High Court of Australia.
Jerico Mandybur: I want to start by asking you about language. Do you have a stance on the prohibition or use of certain words when it comes to gender?
Norrie: Yes. I don't think that words are given to us by God. We make them up to communicate and the meaning changes according to context. There's no magic word that makes you disappear in a puff of smoke, or words that do magic and heal everything. Words don't have magic, we ascribe meaning to them and it's the way we use them that determines their fate.
Why do you think Australia was the first Western country to recognise gender neutrality?
Are we more special than other countries? I think we got lucky [laughs]. This is something that's been happening around the world. Other countries lead the world in marriage equality, but we're trailing there. We've just managed to get recognition of non-specific gender, non-specific sex. I don't think we're inherently better or worse than any other country, but it was nice to get a win!
Does the cultural and political climate in Australia ever get you down? You always seem so positive.
It saddened me that Ian Thorpe didn't come out at least when he wrote his autobiography. Publishing a story, calling it your true story and then lying — that was hard. I've listened to interviews since then and I guess I can appreciate that he felt the need to lie. It saddens me that Australian society still makes a major sportsperson think that they can't come out. I think a much better role model is someone like Matthew Mitcham, the diver, who came out at the beginning of his Olympic career when he had all the sponsorships to lose. He risked it for the sake of his integrity and I think that's where society progresses more. When people just hide in the corner and try to conform to what's acceptable they're just colluding with the forces of oppression. I got off track there, what was the question?
[Laughs] I was wondering if anything gets you down, because you always seem happy.
It's important to have a happy life whether or not you find that your life's work is changing the way things are, which mine is as a social-justice activist. I get motivated because of all the terrible things that happen in the world that I want to stop happening, but I'm not going to be a happy person or help anyone if I'm stuck thinking of how horrible it is. I have to have a good life in order for me to help anybody. It's very important for every person to look after themselves first. Then we've got a lot more resources to look after those around us and indeed make the world a better place.
What's the best or the most memorable reaction you've had when riding your bubble-machine bike?
I guess just being stopped at the lights when people come up and say how much they love the bubble machine. They tell me how they were really depressed one day and saw the bubbles and it made them smile. I love getting messages like that. I think it's really funny that most people in Sydney know of me thanks to the bubble machine, not because of the story about the sex and gender stuff! They don't know what I'm sitting on — they just see someone on a bicycle with bubbles!
What does the court's decision to recognise your androgyny mean for Australia?
I think it means that it is now a valid option for people to choose. At the moment it's pretty limited — in New South Wales you have to have a certain surgery and get a certificate saying certain things. But now it's established that you can exist as a person without necessarily being nailed down as either a man or a woman. Now people are free to choose what appeals to them. One of the things that strikes me is the way that little babies — if doctors aren't sure of their sex — will be operated on to make them one thing or the other, because the thinking is that in society you're either one thing or the other. So maybe more people will be able to grow up the way that nature made them.
Did the judge's ruling surprise you at all?
I was a bit astonished that the five of them seemed so supportive and gave the other side a really hard time. I began to feel sorry for the opposition. The judges acted like personal friends of mine who knew my situation backwards and had even thought it through into even more difficult circumstances, because they were taking the point of view that everybody must have equal treatment. They came up with these examples, it was something like, "If I was a hermaphrodite and I married a transvestite and we had children that changed sex, why couldn't they go to whatever school?" It was these really convoluted examples, so that kind of surprised me — that they insisted the law recognise everybody equally without discrimination.
So it wasn't just the click of a pen. It was only when we went public that allegedly they received a legal opinion saying they couldn't possibly have done it or it was a mistake. I don't know who gave them that opinion or who asked for it.
How welcoming has LGBT community been over the years?
I guess I've always been part of the wider community, or at least not strictly a LGBT community, because I hang around with artistic people, creative people, people who don't like labels, really. Maybe a greater number of gay people than in all society, but I'm not hanging out on Oxford Street; I'm not comfortable with commercial gay establishments. Anywhere where you're there because of the label I'm not going to fit in, because I don't fit a particular label. I've had a lot of support from the general GLBT community over the years, I appreciate it greatly, but I feel like I'm much more a part of the dynamic inner-city thing [laughs].
What's the meaning behind your former surname 'mAy-welby' and the capitalisation of the 'A'?
It made sense at the time. I think it was just a joke: "May well be this, may well be that." But it's also permission to be well! And the capital 'A' was a redistribution of capital.
[Laughs] You've been in Redfern for twelve years. How has it changed?
Well, it's the inner city so of course it's going to see a lot of gentrification, but there's also ghetto-fication. I guess the two forces work very dynamically here on The Block. In particular when some rich people have bought houses and put solar panels up the wazoo, while next door there's an evicted place that's fallen to pieces and burnt out. I hope that it stays a bit ghetto-ish. I don't want my rent going up!
Do you have any heroes?
Quentin Crisp. Number 1.
What did you like about Quentin?
The way he demonstrated integrity in being a minority of one, which everyone is. The way he demonstrated integrity when he was excluded from gay society because he was too obvious — spoiling it for the rest of us — but he stayed witty and intelligent and true to himself. He realised that style is the art of being yourself on purpose.
Last question! If Australia were a young person and they wanted advice agony aunt–style, what would you tell them?
Share your toys! [Laughs] When the kids next door haven't got anything and they're banging on your door, share your stuff with them. Get on with them and play with them. Don't send battle boats out. Play nice with others — that's my advice to Australia.
Originally published in Oyster Magazine #105
You're obviously a really inspiring figure to a lot of people all over the world, but what motivates you?
I just live my life on a daily basis and go for a ride on my bubble machine and spend a lot of quality time with my cat and my friends and my comic books. I just try to appreciate it when people come up to me in public and say they like what I've done. It's nice to be part of a network of people who are trying to make the world a better place.
Do you feel young people today are becoming more accepting of diversity?
That's certainly my experience, but I might be inside a bubble! I was reading recently that 80% of Australians thought that racism was OK. This is the society we live in. We're not angels; we're not divine beings. We may be evolved but we're not all perfect. In my life I don't meet many racists or sexists because I live in the inner city. But in our broader society we do have some attitudes that we have to shift. I'm very encouraged by the way young people are being a lot more broad-minded. They would see things like racism as terribly unacceptable, most of them. That encourages me. And they've really taken on board the new gender-neutral pronouns and really insisted that a space be made for people to identify as anything that they like.
What if you had define androgyny to someone who wasn't in a bubble and who'd never heard of it?
I think we're pretty androgynous as human beings, as primates. As mammals, male or female, we all have the structure of a uterus, we've all got nipples, we all produce prostatic fluid. There are many sexual characteristics that we think are specific to one sex, but we all have them. When humans develop in the womb there are two sets of plumbing and generally one set will completely develop. Many different things happen during that process, that's how we end up with humans slightly less than 50% male and slightly less than 50% female and a small number somewhere in between — a mix of either. And as human beings we're not very different; it's not like gorillas where the males are giant and the females are small and submissive. Our men and women are pretty much the same size and in fact there's a huge overlap. It's doesn't serve us to treat the sexes as two completely different species. We get the best out of humans when everyone has equal rights and can nurture them according to their talents and interests. We shouldn't be held back by someone else's label. It closes us off to the whole of who we are.
Why do you think your 'gender not specified' with Births, Deaths and Marriages was initially withdrawn?
Well, initially it was accepted; they didn't withdraw until we went public — when we'd had it for a whole month. They knew what they were doing, they changed their computer system to issue the certificate because they had to change the sex field so it could be more than two options.
