They Actually Encouraged Us To Change Our Birth Certificates.

They wanted us to get jobs and marry, they wanted us to be productive members of society.

Who are “they?” It was the Republican party. Yes the Republican party but that was back in the 60s. In 1965 ten states have passed laws to allow changes to birth certificates and many of them were Republican states.*

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


[...]
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.

When Plecker took office, the birth certificate was a relative novelty—a Progressive-era reform pushed in part as a eugenics measure to protect old-stock white America from nonwhites and immigrants. Plecker’s article, “A Standard Certificate of Birth,” published in 1914, was one of the first to advocate for nationwide registration of a baby’s birthdate, age, sex, “legitimacy,” and race. It urged that the forms be worded simply enough to be understood by midwives—to suit “the infantile intellects of our host of grannies, who hold in their dirt-laden hands the lives of thousands of mothers and infants.”

The birth certificate was invented in-part to enforce racism and xenophobia just before the “War to End All Wars”

Plecker would, I suspect, not be surprised to learn that in 2018, the birth certificate is being used as a weapon against transgender people. To him, the birth certificate always was a weapon; he deployed it in a nearly 40-year campaign of racial terrorism against Virginia’s black residents—and a disturbingly successful attempt at what Coleman calls “pencil genocide” against the state’s Native American population. It was particularly powerful in his hands because he was one of the architects of Virginia’s notorious Racial Integrity Act, passed in 1924 to prevent racially mixed marriages. Enforcing the Act required the state to maintain comprehensive records of its residents’ race. The race had to be recorded on the birth certificate, and Plecker policed that record-keeping ruthlessly. The birth certificate, he believed, was a key part of preserving the purity of the white race. Under the law, there were two and only two answers: “white” or “colored.” The notation was important: It would determine whom the individual could marry, where he or she could seek medical care, and even where he or she could be buried.
[…]
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.

When the birth certificate bill was being passed there were many Republicans who claimed it was a historic document and shouldn’t be changed. But as the article points out it is used for identification and proof of citizenship.

And the only place you actually need your birth certificate is when you are applying for a job, your driver license, or a passport.

The opposition to recognition of transgender status makes the claim, first and foremost, that they are sticking up for science. There are two and only two sexes, male and female, they argue, and one is born one or the other. “Biology isn’t bigotry,” Ryan Anderson, a senior researcher at the Heritage Foundation and the author of When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, told a panel at Heritage. The emerging contrary medical consensus, Anderson argues, has come about because “transgender activists … [have] co-opted many professional associations for their cause.”

We know that is crap. There are dozens of chromosome combinations; XX and XY are the two most common combinations but there is also XXY, XYY, XXXY, and just X. And then there are Mosaic individuals who have two sets of chromosomes. Then there the proteins that determine gender such as 5-alpha reductase or they have Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS). Nature is always experimenting.

So why did the Republican party shift away from us? Well in one word… votes.

When the Republicans crawled into bed with the Evangelical Christians, the Evangelical Christians hated anything LGBTQ+ and so the Republicans hated anything LGBTQ+.

When the trans non-discrimination bill in 2011 passed it was straight down party lines but when the bill was originally introduced in 2007 the vote in the Senate was bipartisan.