We Are Lucky…

…Here in Connecticut, it is easy to change your name and birth certificate but for many other states it is impossible.

What is interesting is that back in the 60s and 70s the Republicans were all for it, the saw it as an economic necessarily but now…

How Birth Certificates Are Being Weaponized Against Trans People
A century ago, these documents were used to reinforce segregation. Today, they’re being used to impose binary identities on transgender people.
The Atlantic
By Garrett Epps
Professor of constitutional law at the University of Baltimore
June 8, 2018

When Walter A. Plecker died in August 1947, his “death was considered a gift by many,” writes historian Arica L. Coleman in her searing history, That the Blood Stay Pure: African Americans, Native Americans, and the Predicament of Race and Identity in Virginia. “It marked the end of one of the most virulent, bureaucratic, and racist regimes in the history of [Virginia] and the nation.”

Six decades later, however, Plecker’s ghost still sometimes shows his face—most recently in litigation about the rights of transgender Americans.

Plecker was Virginia’s registrar of vital statistics from 1912 to 1946. He played a leading role in creating and enforcing the grotesque racial dictatorship called segregation, which ruled the South from the 1890s until 1964—and whose heritage still divides and degrades the region today.
So how did all this morph into a document to be used against us?
The infamous “bathroom bills”—passed and partially repealed in North Carolina, and proposed in more than a dozen other states—were also birth-certificate based; they would make binding for life the assignment of sex performed at birth. In Whitaker v. Kenosha Unified School District, decided last year by the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, Ash Whitaker, a transgender boy, was denied permission to use the boys’ bathroom despite two letters from his physician. At oral argument, the district argued instead that it would only accept “a birth certificate that designated his sex as male.” The appeals court, holding for Ash, noted the “arbitrary nature” of reliance on birth certificates.
[…]
Faulkner University law professor Adam J. MacLeod argues that these changes to birth certificates should not be made:

… the correspondence between a child’s identity and natural parentage is precisely why birth certificates list the child’s actual, biological parents. As embodied beings, our identity is constituted in large part in our biological reality. Each of us inherits (for better and worse) the biological basis for his identity from his father and mother. To record as parent someone who is not the child’s biological parent is to make a permanent misstatement about the child’s identity.

It seems clear, however, that what we call birth certificates are not scientific or medical documents. When a baby is born, hospitals fill out and file what is called a form attesting to a “live birth,” which contains information about parentage, weight, sex, and general health and is shared with public-health authorities. The birth certificate, issued later, is primarily used as a form of identification. It is frequently altered later in life—most commonly after adoption, when most states allow the adoptive parent or parents to be substituted for those recorded at birth. Transgender people seek the same opportunity to make their birth certificates match their present identity.

However, we run into a roadblock… many states still require surgery. The opposition says it is a historic document but as we seen it can be altered, so that argument doesn’t hold water.

Here is our old friend Walter Plecker, enforcing binaries in the name of science. What is curious is that some people who claim skepticism of big government in other areas are eager for it in this one. We can trust government to determine who we really are, and to make us wear that label for life.

Last month a federal court in Puerto Rico held that the commonwealth’s government must amend its birth certificates for transgender people. In a case brought by four transgender residents of the commonwealth and a local advocacy group, Puerto Rico Para Tod@s, and staffed by pro-bono lawyers from Lambda Legal and biglaw powerhouse Ropes & Gray, District Judge Carmelo Consuelo Cerezo wrote:

The right to identify our own existence lies at the heart of one’s humanity. And so, we must heed their voices: “the woman that I am,” “the man that I am.” Plaintiffs know they are not fodder for memoranda legalese. They have stepped up for those whose voices, debilitated by raw discrimination, have been hushed into silence. They cannot wait for another generation, hoping for a lawmaker to act. They, like Linda Brown, took the steps to the courthouse to demand what is due: their right to exist, to live more and die less.

So the courts are recognizing our need and right to change our birth certificate.

We need all the states to allow us to change our birth certificate and further more we need to question why gender in on it at all.

For more information on CT birth certificate and other information on changing your documentation click here.