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Listen, I support transgender rights. I really do.
...that said: No, sex should not be removed from birth certificates. It's a freakin' birth certificate! There are plenty of other legal documents that you can change as an adult, if you choose to alter your identity. The passport, on the other hand, should indicate the gender with which the individual identifies, particularly if the individual has chosen to physically identify with that gender. Otherwise, it wouldn't make much sense since the point of a passport is to match the info and picture with the person standing before you. There's nothing political about it, it's literally just a form of legal identification. Same goes for state ID and driver's licenses.
I think the birth certificate should indicate the physical features at birth, and should be amended if those features change. If the information doesn't accurately reflect the person, then it has no value.
If the information doesn't accurately reflect the person, then it has no value.
But it DOES accurately reflect the information of the person at birth. That's the point of a birth certificate: to record particular details of the birth.
Say a baby boy is born to two married parents who divorce a few years later. The mother gets full custody, and marries again. Her new husband adopts her child, so they are both now the parents of the kid.
In that scenario you wouldn't retroactively revise the birth certificate to make the step father the father on the birth certificate, would you? Even if the kid only thinks of the step-dad as his father and is completely estranged from his birth father, you probably wouldn't revise the birth certificate in that case. Every other legal document or census document that that individual fills out can and should reflect the new information, identifying the step father as the father, but it wouldn't be accurate to the circumstances of the birth to revise the birth certificate.
It's my opinion that the same is true of transgender individuals. In the here and now we must respect their chosen identity, but it'd be factually wrong to edit their birth certificates. And the sex of baby, to me, is something that makes sense to record. Just like it makes sense, to me, to record the names of the parents (if they're known), the name of the hospital, etc.
A document like that isn't a feel-good pride statement or a political declaration, it's simply a recording of facts of a moment of time.
My point would be that regardless of what a person " thinks they are " the biological truth is inside of them. Ovaries ? Womb ? Testicles, penis ? DNA reveals the biological facts. Even if a person has a "sex change " they are still male or female, at a cellular level.
Kids at age eight are not legally able to make such decisions, as "gender identification " lets wait until they are adults, under the law, and they can have at it .
Re birth certificates. It is a record of birth, period. Passports are for travel identification, not political statements.
The mother of a transgender child wants birth certificates not to indicate if a person is male or female. Apparently a lawyer in Vancouver wants to change the passport system too. http://ca.news.yahoo.com/mom-transge...122859586.html
Do you agree with their viewpoints? Is it time to change the system of identifying your sex on documents?
I don't think that birth certificates and passports should avoid stating one's sex/gender. Rather, I think that individuals should have the option of changing this information on their birth certificates and on their passports if they live as their preferred gender for a specific amount of time (there shouldn't be a demand to get SRS in order for this to be done). As a side note, I wouldn't mind having a genderless option (and/or something similar) for birth certificates and for passports as well if a certain individual does not identify with a specific gender or if this individual identifies with both genders (for instance, if this individual is gender-fluid).
I don't think that birth certificates and passports should avoid stating one's sex/gender. Rather, I think that individuals should have the option of changing this information on their birth certificates and on their passports if they live as their preferred gender for a specific amount of time (there shouldn't be a demand to get SRS in order for this to be done). As a side note, I wouldn't mind having a genderless option (and/or something similar) for birth certificates and for passports as well if a certain individual does not identify with a specific gender or if this individual identifies with both genders (for instance, if this individual is gender-fluid).
Wow, you 're very tolerant and progressive for stating that you believe there could also be a third "genderless" option, few people really agree to such a viewpoint, let alone abolish legal gender on documents and I am personally also not so sure to support the latter, but I am simply uncertain about possible harmful effects on women as the still mostly much more disadvantaged "gender". I do not know about the effect on sex quotas or women shelters, when such a step is being taken, but perhaps the legal gender stated on a document is irrelevant in relation to the needs and necessities for humans, mostly women whose societal discrimination can be compensated by programs, constituted exclusively for a specific group of people.
Many governments defend the legal gender-issue by the fact that they have male only-conscription for their military or ban civil marriages for same-sex couples, things where the designation becomes important. Since I don not support any sex-specific policies on these issues, a legal gender-designation based on that should also not occur.
I believe a third legal sex/gender-option should be available for children born with intersex conditions to meet the address the reasonable needs of those people. Additionally, the third gender can help gender-non conforming people by overcoming the legal foundation for a person's gender dysphoria.
Birth certificates actually have to be changed for full transition-transsexuals because not (only) the passport but also the birth certificate is often required for legal hurdles, where the legal gender is relevant, for example civil marriage licenses. So when a person has changed her or his gender, the birth certificate becomes improper in proving someone's gender, there are two solutions: Let the birth certificate become irrelevant for all bureaucratic legal identifications of people, especially in regard to gender and let only updatable documents prevail. If it does not happen, then the birth certificate has to be changable, otherwise you will encounter giant legal and unnecessary discrimination against a small group of people and I as well as most other people thinking coharently for their own blessing as how a society can be fair in regard to all individuals with rules applicable by and to all, would not support such legal hurdles for transgender people as there are in Idaho, Ohio and Tennessee, as far as I know.
Of course, remove gender! Just another way to identify someone without probable cause!
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