There are officially six people, four adults and two babies, that are registered as non-binary in Malta, a government official confirmed.

Four adults have their gender marked as X for gender-neutral on their official documents like passports, ID cards and residence permits. Meanwhile, two babies, both born in 2019, have been unassigned a gender at birth.

The option to have their gender marked as X was introduced as part of the Gender Identity Act passed in 2015, and came into force in 2017, in the middle of Pride Week.

Today, people who want to change their gender on their documents must take an oath in the presence of a notary, together with a standard application to Identity Malta.

Certain states in the US, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Nepal, New Zealand, Pakistan and the Netherlands also provide the option for citizens to be legally recognised as non-binary.

More recently, legal amendments allow couples who don’t want to assign a gender to their baby to be given the option to leave that section of the birth certificate blank.

The island has some of the best rights for LGBTQI+ people in the world, ranking first in an international index for five consecutive years.

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