Dear Portfolio Committee on Home Affairs,

Changing the digit that currently determines assigned sex is a costly exercise with potentially catastrophic results.

In many IT systems (Especially in the medical field) the assigned sex digit is used to determine whether someone was assigned male or female at birth.

Your assigned gender is critical in making medical decisions (Whether to check for prostate or cervix cancer for example) and changing this will have far-reaching consequences.

This will require large rewrites of code for many companies outside of the medical field as well, while this is not as important, it is still a factor to consider.

I am all for freedom and claiming your own identity, however, it needs to be approached with caution when we build these contingent identities into a core data system.