Students applying to Ontario universities for 2017 will have the option of identifying as male, female or “another gender identity” when filling out forms.

Ray Darling, the University of Waterloo registrar, said he began investigating the issue after a student came to his office last fall, wanting to change the individual’s gender on university records, “and I realized the options we had were female and male … and that caused me to look into how we collected this data, and I realized we got it from the Ontario Universities’ Application Centre,” the province’s application clearing-house.

“It asked students to identify as male or female, and it was a mandatory field,” he added.

Now, when students begin to fill out forms to start post-secondary studies starting in the fall of next year, the field will no longer be required, and will also offer the third option.

Starting in 2018, the “another gender identity” choice will include an open text field underneath, should students wish to be more specific.

“A big part of this is just affirming for them, their identity, and for our sake going to give us data we haven’t had in the past,” to better serve all students, said Darling.

Because university applications are handled centrally, there are rules about altering them, so a provincial working group was created with Darling as chair.

The group considered listing specific terms such as transgender, but did not want anyone to feel excluded.

“We looked at what’s most appropriate and we tried to cover all the possible options, but (thought) we might be missing some, and it’s constantly evolving, so we used ‘another gender identity’ as an umbrella term for the first year, knowing we would have a free-form text box after the first year.”

He said a handful of schools in other jurisdictions have made similar changes, but not many in Canada. The University of Alberta has started offering “another/prefer not to disclose.”

The new Ontario applications come on the heels of a federal government bill that, once passed, would make it illegal to discriminate in the workplace based on gender identity or gender expression.