What Gender Am I?

Should money or age or your health determine your gender?

In states that you can change the gender on your birth certificate all most all of them require surgery first and that means you have to have big dollars to have the therapy first to get your letters to say that you can have Gender Confirming Surgery and then you have to shell out the cash to actually have it done. Then and only then can you have your birth certificate changed. For some people because of health reason they cannot have any surgery so they will be forever prohibited being able to change their birth certificate. While others because of their age cannot have the surgery until they get older.

Consider the case of Calliope Wong, a student who applied to Smith College, an all women college and was denied admission because she didn’t have surgery yet, but she has been on hormones for a number of years and living as a woman for two years.

Smith College Returns Application Of Transgender Teen
ABC News
Posted: Mar 26, 2013

(ABC News)--Calliope Wong, a high school senior from Connecticut, has twice sent an application to the prestigious all-female Smith College, but her papers have been returned without even an official admissions review.

It's not her grades or SAT scores, but her self-identity as a transgender female.

Wong, 17, was born male, which her family indicated on her federal application for financial aid in order to coincide with her Social Security number. But her admission materials describe her as female.

Smith has told her it cannot process her admission application as a female because the gender markers on her forms conflict.
[…]
The Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, is a federal form that can be filled out by the student, a parent or a guidance counselor and does not require official proof certifying gender.

Wong said her father filled out the FASFA forms, "according to what he thought was safest and most logical." He marked it male to match her Social Security information, which she said they had not yet had the chance to update.

So it all boiled down to whether you put an “F” or an “M” on a piece of paper.

If you look at “my papers” you will see that half of them have an “F” on them and two of them have an “M” on them.  My driver licenses, passport and my graduate school records have an “F” and Social Security and birth certificate have an “M” on them because for those two require surgery which I cannot afford right now. So what is my legal gender, it all depends what paperwork they require.

Consider that in Illinois you do not require surgery to have your birth certificate changed…

A Cook County judge approved a new decree Tuesday that would allow transgender Illinoisans to obtain birth certificates with their correct gender from the Illinois Department of Public Health without having to undergo genital reconstruction surgery.

The policy change comes as the result of a settlement reached in July in a class-action legal challenge involving three transgender individuals who filed suit in May 2010 after they were denied corrected birth certificates from the IDPH because they did not undergo genital surgery.

So if Ms. Wong was from Illinois her father could have checked “Female” box, but because Connecticut require surgery, her father checked the “Male” box and she couldn’t apply for Smith College.

Do you see any justice in this?