#moleg

He's got a trans nibling and is standing here telling #moleg to fuck off. But, yano, politely.

As a trans constituent of yours, I would urge you to reconsider your stance on this subject. To use the example from your email:

"I don’t believe a birth certificate is a living document. You can’t change your place of birth, so why should you be able to change your gender?"

If my place of birth was recorded incorrectly on my birth certificate, I would hope I would be allowed to change it so it was the proper information. Gender is the same thing. It's not that a person is necessarily *changing* their gender, but that they are *correcting* inaccurate information.

As a parent, I'm sure you are aware that when a baby is born, the doctor does not draw up a full genetic panel to view the child's chromosomal makeup before deciding that the baby is a boy or a girl. The doctor glances at the visible genitals and assigns the baby's sex based on what is considered typical for people sharing that configuration of external genitals.

Sometimes the doctor gets it wrong.

Even if doctors *did* perform all that testing and assign the sex based on the child's chromosomes, that *still* doesn't mean the person's gender would be recorded correctly, because gender exists in the brain. It involves how we interact with the world and how the world sees and treats us.

You say a birth certificate is not a living document, yet it is one of the most common documents utilized to verify identity. And other forms of ID—such as driver’s license and passport—base their information off of the sex marker on the birth certificate. If I am still expected to produce my birth certificate for identification as a 45-year-old adult, then it needs to accurately reflect my existence as a 45-year-old adult.

Honestly, I would be in favor of no longer recording sex or gender on the birth certificate. It’s not vital information and, if the number of laws being proposed to limit changes is anything to go by, it’s often not accurate information, so what is the point? And if it *is* considered accurate often enough to be worth putting on there, then perhaps there aren’t enough cases where it’s needing changed that laws should be passed to prevent it.