To give parents more time to make potentially critical decisions on their children's future, Germany will no longer require them to check male or female on birth certificates, CBS News reported.

The policy went into effect on Nov. 1, making Germany the first European country to allow a "third sex" option. Countries such as Australia, Nepal, New Zealand, Pakistan, and Bangladesh have similar laws, according to CBS News.

Babies born with some proportion of both sex's genitalia are no longer classified as hermaphrodites, but intersex, CBS News reported. According to The Intersex Society of North America, an intersex baby can be expected approximately one in every 2,000 births.

Intersex individuals fall on a wide spectrum. There is "XX Intersex," where people possess female chromosomes and ovaries but have external genitals that are physically male. The opposite occurs for "XY Intersex." In other cases, people simultaneously possess female and male internal and external characteristics. Finally, some individuals may have uniform sex characteristics, but the pattern of their sex chromosomes differs from the standard XY or XX, according to CBS.

Dr. Hertha Richter-Appelt, a sexual scientist at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany, said that an intersex person who received corrective surgery at birth typically agrees with the choice their parents made, but that is not always the case, Spiegel Online International reported. She recommends waiting for the child to hit puberty before a major surgery.

"When the issue is definitively deciding what is truly better for the children, we have to be honest and say that we often don't know," Richter-Appelt said.

Lucie Veith, chair of the German Association of Intersex People, takes Richter-Appelt's recommendations a step further. She believes parents and intersex people should be restricted from authorizing such a surgery until the patient turns 16, according to Spiegel.

"The right to bodily integrity is violated," she said, referring to one of the rights of the Basic Law, Germany's constitution. She did, however, call Germany's new law a "step in the right direction."

Early surgical procedures have decreased though they are still performed too regularly, according to surgeon Susanne Krege, who specializes in intersex children at the Maria-Hilf Hospital in the western German city of Krefeld. She said she only performs surgery when the parents insist on it, and points out that the effects, including lifelong hormone treatment, decreased clitoral sensitivity, and a greater risk of cancer, should be taken into serious consideration, Spiegel reported.

For Krege, the debate is also about if surgery should be performed and not always when.

"You can be happy as an intersex person too," she said.