I was watching a show about transgendered children and one of them was like 6 or 7 and the parents had their child’s gender legally changed.
Obviously you do this through the courts, but what’s the criteria? A pychologist’s diagnoses? Obviously a six year old isn’t going to have had any surgery or hormones.
I guess the parent did this so they could enroll the kid as their were issues about which bathroom the child would use and such.
I also thought of this cause of the Chaz Bono controversy where people were saying she should dance with a man not a woman, though I believe she has legally changed her sex through the courts.
Can I tack another question onto this? How is he considered male without gender reassignment surgery? I’m not trying to be offensive, I am really curious. I know there have been transgender flame wars on this board in the past, but I’m looking for information, not anger and insult.
SRSs are much more common among transwomen than transmen. As the crude saying goes, it’s easier to dig a hole than to build a pole. A lot of transmen just do hormones and top surgery.
Sex in legal terms is a state issue in the U.S., not a federal one, so the exact steps someone needs to take to change their sex will vary on where they live. The issue obviously also varies from country to country around the world. Here’s a site that purportedly lists what you need to do to legally change your sex in each state.
However, that’s just the legal procedure. Even if someone hasn’t jumped through all the hoops to get their documentation in order, they should be considered and referred to as the gender they choose.
This. In my experience, the nicest thing you can do for a transgendered friend or acquaintance, is to start using their preferred pronoun and name, early and often. Even if it feels weird to you, even if they don’t really LOOK very transitioned, even if they haven’t had surgery or changed the information on their driver’s license. No excuses. Use the pronoun and name that they prefer, right from the first time you’re informed of the gender switch.
I’m a man. But suppose, for the sake of argument, that I just decided I wanted to legally be a woman. I’m not planning on any sex-change surgical procedure or living as a woman. I’ll be the exact same person I am now but, on paper, I’ll be female.
Is that legally possible in any state? Is there a state that allows “at will” sex changes for record keeping purposes without the person having to demonstrate they’ve actually made any changes?
Sorry to give a standard legal answer, but it depends where you are in the US as this is a state thing. I believe some states, including Texas, refuse to recognize GRS, and you therefore get situations where a person born as a man who has GRS to become a woman will be incarcerated in a male facility.
Even US states that do legally recognize gender change seem to require a metric assload of documentation from applicants and their physicians, therapists, etc., before the court will officially approve the change of gender in one’s legal status.
Simply saying “hey, I want to be legally female although I do not otherwise identify as a woman in any way” would AFAICT never be taken seriously.
That seems to be the case, this is why I was surprised when I found the parents were able to legally change the sex of their kid who was like 6 or 7 from male to female. I guess they were able to jump through a lot of documentations.
Here’s a related question that got in my mind they other day:
If a transgendered is married, and then does everything needed to legally change their gender, but lives in a state that does not recognize same-sex marriage…what happens? Can they stay married and be sort of ‘grandfathered’ in, or do they have to get a divorce? I mean…can the state/federal government force you to divorce?
I wish I knew the answer too. It’s a test case I want to run in Texas. My guess is that Texas would not recognize the marriage, which would have interesting FF&C consequences.
To be more complete, I don’t think they would have to divorce - the state of Texas would simply not recognize the marriage and they would have none of the state benefits. Given that the federal government, I believe, recognizes sex changes, the couple would still be married under federal law, as well as under the law of the state where they married.
My WAG is that the child was gender ambiguous at birth. A choice of gender would have been made to register the birth and this now appears to have been the “wrong” choice for physical and or psychological reasons.
Nitpick starter: Saying “a transgendered” is like saying “a Black.” It’s not as offensive as something like “tranny,” but it kind of makes a person wince to hear it.
The problem is that marriage and sexual identity have legal definitions that vary greatly between states. Here’s the Wikipedia article on legal aspects of transsexualism in the U.S.
Here’s some language from a potentially relevant case:
Now, granted, this was about whether or not a heterosexual marriage was valid when it was conducted after one of the partners transitioned (would have been a same-sex marriage before the transition). But here’s a PDF from a transgender resource group in California:
While we can’t be sure since AFAIK this has never been tested in the courts here, the general thinking seems to be that a marriage license that was valid at the time it was issued remains valid except through explicitly established means of ending the marriage.
Yup! Unfortunately, the same types of people who make a stink about the marriages of trans people (either before or after transition) are also the same types who are opposed to legally recognizing same-sex marriages.
Thanks for catching that, tumbled. I’m only vaguely aware of who Chaz Bono is, and I have no clue if “Chaz” is a typically male or female name, so I just assumed that he was a transwoman–apparently not.
The process / required documentation may even vary among entities in a given state. Remember, there isn’t one central clearinghouse for personal information, so a transgendered person typically ends up addressing the issue with the DMV, the state office that handles birth certificates, any schools they attended, etc. Each of these has its own set of hoops to be jumped through, and it’s surprising how much - or how little - documentation each demands.
For example, to fix the sex on a driver’s license, the DMV in Illinois requires only a letter from one’s therapist explaining the situation (“it will be really embarrassing for this person if the sex on the license isn’t changed”). Changing a birth certificate, on the other hand, typically requires a letter from one’s doctor asserting that one has had surgery (top and bottom surgery for a male-to-female change, top surgery for a female-to-male change). Changing the sex on college transcripts may require nothing more than a letter from the transgendered person him- or herself.
I was looking through some of the entries in the website Shot From Guns linked to. Some states specified a procedure for the applicant to establish that they had actually changed their gender. But the entries for other states did not specify this. So I was wondering if this just meant the information was incomplete or if there were some states which really didn’t require proof an an actual change in order to legally change genders.
Out of curiosity, why change a person’s records back to birth? Chaz Bono is a man and I can see changing any of his current legal records to reflect his gender. But he was born a woman in 1969. He didn’t become a man until 2008. Shouldn’t a birth certificate reflect a person’s gender at the time they were born? Changing his birth certificate to male seems to imply that Bono was a man in 1970, 1980, and 1990 - which was not the case.
