Why isn’t there a federal birth certificate by now? It’s dumb that in 2023 states have that much control over people’s identities.
Some blue state should offer trans people birth certificates there.
Birth certificates are issued by the birth state
Is there a federal law that says so? If not, who cares?
Only reason I could see this being logical in the first place is if being a biological male/female would impact the medical treatment of anything in a major capacity. Otherwise, fuck this law, it’s stupid.
Just to clarify birth certificates are never used for medical treatment. If this information is needed the kind approach would be to add a new field to record gender assigned at birth.
https://www.usbirthcertificates.com/articles/what-do-i-need-a-birth-certificate-for
Sure, but when is the last time your birth certificate mattered in a medical setting? Nobody asks for that to give care. And it makes no difference to care anyway, the patient will just give their medical history to their doctor.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Kansas will no longer change transgender people’s birth certificates to reflect their gender identities, the state health department said Friday, citing a new law that prevents the state from legally recognizing those identities.
The decision from the state Department of Health and Environment makes Kansas one of a handful of states that won’t change transgender people’s birth certificates.
It already was among the few states that don’t change the gender marker on transgender people’s driver’s licenses.
Enacted by the GOP-controlled Legislature over Kelly’s veto, it took effect July 1 and defines male and female based only on the sex assigned to a person at birth.
“As I’ve said before, the state should not discriminate or encroach into Kansans’ personal lives -– it’s wrong, it’s bad for business,” Kelly said in a statement.
The new Kansas law was based on a proposal from several national anti-trans groups and was part of a wave of measures rolling back transgender rights in Republican-controlled statehouses across the U.S. Montana, Oklahoma and Tennessee also don’t allow transgender residents to change their birth certificates, and Montana and Tennessee don’t allow driver’s licenses changes.
The original article contains 245 words, the summary contains 191 words. Saved 22%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
As someone who supports rights for everyone because I don’t care at all about any of this stuff - I think this is right, it is to record your gender at birth. It also records their weight which changes too but we don’t change the snapshot of when you’re first born. I think that another certificate should be issued to record how a person wants to be viewed be it changing their name or gender or whatever.
Except we all know this is not done in good faith to fix a real problem. It’s real intent to further push a transphobic agenda and punish people who are trans.
But this should never have been the case, the birth certificate should never have been in this discussion. I don’t want these people to be discriminated against but this is a stupid argument to have made in the first place. It is not transphobic to factually record whether a new born has a penis or a vagina - which is the entirety of what the intention of recording gender has been since the beginning of records.
Birth certificates are not used for any medical purpose. They are entirely for identification.
They are a legal record of your birth, get an ID for identification. I have no problem with someone changing any ID or being considered whatever they want. My only issue is the birth cert side of things.
Would agree, except 99% of person identification, uses sex and specifically YOUR birth certificate. For current identification purposes for anything official.
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This is a bad take. This law’s intent is 100% to hurt trans people. Don’t go looking for reason and justifying it.
The intent of the people behind the law isn’t what I’m discussing. It is that this should never have been on the agenda, argue for inclusion and equal right but don’t argue to change a legal document that merely recorded the facts as they were at the time.
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I dont disagree with with their intention but it’s not what I’m arguing against. I’m merely saying that the document should not be altered after the fact, it should remain as it was then forever more as an official recording of the facts as they were then. That’s all. Don’t change names, genders, parents, or location. Leave it as it was unless there was a legitimate factual error like misspelling a name or address.
The trump ban is something unrelated that I’m not discussing.
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Both of those are false assertions, I’m sorry I don’t fit into the box you’d like. Not everyone who doesn’t subscribe to every facet of social issue as you is a trump supporter.
I don’t disagree that it is their intention.
I’m not discussing their intention, which is why the parallel doesn’t work.
However, because all other records take information from your birth certificate, this effectively bars trans people from having photo identification that aligns with their gender. This creates a safety issue for trans people every time they have to provide said photo identification.
Your birth certificate also records the name your parents gave you at birth, but we’ve allowed people to amend the document when they change their name for a long time. Why is this any different?
Safety issue? If someone is in danger from showing an ID they’re probably in danger already. Regular people wouldn’t care less.
Absolutely, this makes a lot of sense as to why this is dangerous and as to why these people need to change their birth cert.
But the answer to it is to have another legal document created to document the transition.
I didn’t answer your second part, I disagree entirely with changing your name on your birth cert too. I, again, have no problem with people changing their name but it should necessitate a new document.
it is to record your gender at birth
Plenty of folks don’t know. There are experts that are brought in to determine confusing cases, and they sometimes get it wrong. Be happy if your genitals just match one of the obvious binaries and you don’t have this issue. But many folks do.
I don’t understand this, I get there are very rare cases of a third chromosome or gene or whatever the X and Ys are. But the vast vast majority of cases it is completely down to if the baby has a penis or a vagina. That is it, I’m a supporter of people’s rights and I don’t like appearing on the same side as horrible people but the purpose of the document is to record the facts as they stand. If experts need to be called in to determine the result, then we take their determination as the result as they are the experts. If need be put an asterisk to show there was a consensus required.
The purpose of the document is to record facts but you’re ok if those facts are wrong sometimes. That seems strange to me.
Why does the document event need a gender or sex? We’re recording that a person was born for proof of citizenship. Citizenship doesn’t require genitalia.
We’re recording for a number of reasons which includes birth of citizenship. There are important demographic reasons for why you need to know what % of your population is male versus female.
For example, policy in China where there are a larger ratio of males would need to be different than in Russia where there is a higher ratio of females.
I don’t really see the issue in all of this. A trans person should be treated as whatever gender they wanna be but they are born one sex or the other. We can’t pretend otherwise, makes no sense.
Sex. Isn’t. Binary. Intersex people exist. They exist. They are real.
I’d agree with you if there were three options: obviously male, obviously female, TBD. That would be more accurate. But to claim there are only two and you know at birth is just ignorant.
Ok then put TBD on ones you can’t tell at birth. Sure, that makes sense. There are exceptions to everything.
What percentage of people are born with both, or none or indistinguishable sexual organs? I’m not entirely against TBD for the record but I think your argument is disingenuous, not every person who is trans is one the incredibly rare circumstances where this issue arises.
Some people live as one gender for a long time before transitioning and while I’m happy for them to do as they please and live a safe and happy life I don’t think they should change their birth cert. Official documents are used for am enormous amount of statistics and changing them serves only to confuse the data and misrepresent facts. All that is needed is an amendment document that shows that while their birth cert says male they are now female. That’s it
Around 1in 1,000.
You are going through ridiculous leaps and lengths to avoid the obvious simple solution that already exists today. And for what? A strange need for a document to be immutable? Perfection of historical information?
Those seem like tenuous reasons do something that actively takes options from people who value those options.
If you’re adopted, you can get your birth certificate amended to put the names of your adoptive parents on it. If you change your name, you can do the same. They’re exclusively singling out gender here.
You make a good point. We can change who we are but we can’t change who we were.
I can just see right wingers trying to make yet more laws to fuck over trans people tho saying they can only use their “assigned at birth certificate” or something.
That’s exactly it, and it’s really annoying for people to assume I’m a right winger because I have a very slight and specific difference of opinion.
I could see them doing just that and it should be tackled every single time.
It records your sex and that never changes with current technology.
We should change the field to gender if we want people to change it.
I don’t agree that there is a difference, I have tried but they were used interchangeably for so long. I think that people should be allowed to feel and be whoever they want but I don’t understand how that relates back to gender or sex on your birth cert.
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The terms sex and gender were used interchangeably by many for a very long time due to cisnormativity, because for most people their sex and gender matched. It’s only due to the recent rise of awareness in trans issues that people have begun to use them to refer to separate specific concepts in general use.
Having your sex on your photo ID doesn’t make any sense. The way that this information is used most of the time is to communicate to others what kind of a person they should be looking for. If I told you to look for a “female” person with specific attributes, you wouldn’t go and pick a trans man out of the crowd.
Cis people don’t have to think about any of this, of course, because they’ve never been confronted by the challenges that arise from having documentation that outs them in public. When a trans person shows ID that doesn’t match their gender identity to someone in a position of power, it puts them at risk for mistreatment. Changing gender markers — or “sex” markers as you insist upon — on documents is a safety issue for trans people, and has the bonus effect of being affirming.
The only people who need to know your sex and see your ID are healthcare professionals, and even then, knowing what configuration someone’s genitals had at birth does very little to help them know your current medical status and history. That’s why they have long forms that you have to fill out when you start seeing a new healthcare provider, and why healthcare institutions share medical history records.
I’d also add the consideration that a photo ID also serves the purpose of some base level medical information (or else our listing organ donor status on them is super weird) so having sex on there if you’re unconscious and the EMTs pick you up and need to check makes some sense. No reason both couldn’t work.
I’m sure the EMTs at the scene of the accident are more worried about my head trauma than my genitals. If that becomes relevant later, I’m sure they can look with their own eyes.
I mean you can be unconscious for more than head trauma. My thought was in line with heart issues and if the differences in sex played any part there, due to the differences in the appearance of problems with them between men and women, but maybe that’s not really relevant until they hit the hospital.(Since EMTs are stabilizing focused) Just having it on the card - avoiding the time needed to check especially if they’ve had surgery - seems helpful, if that was relevant. If its not of course it doesn’t need to be there but if there’s EMTs around chime in because obviously I don’t know.
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From a medical perspective, “biological sex” is a lot more complicated than the genitalia you had at birth. Sex hormones (androgens, estrogens, progestogens) have a huge impact on your body, your emotions, and your health. If you’ve been undergoing hormone therapy for a year or more, your biological sex cannot be accurately described as your assigned gender at birth.
It’s actually misleading to use the same set of terms to describe biological sex as we do for gender. In a medical setting you might think of a person’s biological sex as describing a suite of variables that impact that person and their care, e.g., a person should target a value of 100 for this metric; for this biological sex, adjust the target value by -35 to +5 at these age ranges; for this biological sex, adjust by these numbers.
Many of those target values change after a person begins hormone therapy, so it would likely be medically beneficial to list their gender and potentially harmful to list the gender associated with the genitals they had at birth. In cases where this isn’t the case, if the person’s health care provider believes the risk is high, they can provide verbiage that addresses the specific risk in language another health care provider (including an EMT) would understand.
If anything should be written into law on the topic, it should be to empower HCPs and their staff when dealing with government and ubiquitous corporate systems (like insurance companies), not to make blanket decisions that would be overall harmful to the people impacted.
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Ah, so you are just going to recite gender critical (transphobic) rhetoric. There’s nothing more for me to say to you.
Abolish all sex and gender markers on documents.
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Law enforcement. TSA. Many groups need to know your sex.
I believe they fixed it but the wrong sex would trigger an issue with the tsa scanners.
Law enforcement needs to know which group to put you with.
When you travel it is important as well since other countries may not care how you identify. Why passports are problematic.
Why do my genitals matter which metal box I get put into if I get arrested? Or are you going to parrot the “trans women are rapists” talking point the far-right is pushing?
A passport with a gender marker that doesn’t match someone’s presentation is going to cause them far more trouble, because it outs the person as trans and that may be a reason for someone to treat them with prejudice.
You really don’t get they put males with males and females with females? You don’t get why law enforcement would need to know how to classify you?
They’ll know they’re trans when they go through the scanner and the sex doesn’t match the gender. This has been an issue that’s been discussed in the past.
Trans people should not be forced to go into a prison with people of a different gender than them just because they had the misfortune to be born with genitals that didn’t align with society’s expectations of their gender. Genitals they may not even have anymore.
To insist that trans women should be housed with men is inherently transphobic. What benefit do you get out of sex-based segregation? All it does is put trans people in danger.
Who are you arguing against? I never stated an opinion on the topic. I only pointed out the flaw in your statement.
So maybe you should pay attention and stop accusing others of things they never said.
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I am disputing things you are saying because they are harmful. If you don’t believe them, then don’t say them.
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I am not sure what point you’re arguing. I never made a statement if it should or shouldn’t be allowed.
What I stated was the issue.
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You’re acting in bad faith.
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It seems reasonable to me, becoming transgender later in life doesn’t change the official information recorded about you at your birth.
Then why do we allow people to change this official information later in life when they change their name, or to add/remove parents?
Yeah, why do we allow changing the names in their birth certificate? That’s weird, too.
For parents if the information recorded at the time was not accurate and needs to be amended that’s fine by me. I don’t support names being changed on a birth certificate.
It doesn’t affect you at all and you’re 100% okay with the issues it brings trans people. Got it.
How does people changing their gender on a piece of paper affect you? It matters to them, why does it matter to you?
