PA looking at removing sex from birth certificates

Politics & Elections
41

You don’t have to; you can transition and change your sex to something else. But that should involve a legal and medical process, not you just saying “I am now a man/woman”.

Ok? So what? I had no say in being a man. A trans person has no say in their gender not matching their physical sex. So what?

So do you think that once someone goes through the procedure to get their documents changed to the gender they identify with, the government should destroy all records that they were assigned male at birth? Because that’s what you seem to imply: that once someone transitions, the only government documentation that exists should identify them as female.

I don’t know how much more you need me to spell it out. It seems perfectly clear.

Let’s say that Trump signs an EO saying the government will only issue passports that match your birth certificate gender, male or female.

This would suck for trans people. They’d have to get a passport with a gender they do not identify with, or forgo getting a passport at all.

The Great State of Pennsylvania decides that all birth certificates will no longer list sex to combat this.

What you seem to expect is for the federal government to throw their hands up and say, “I would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn’t for those meddling libs!”.

What would actually happen is that the federal government wouldn’t issue a passport to anyone with a PA birth certificate that doesn’t list gender, whether they are cis or trans.

Does that answer your question in sufficient detail?

You can’t. You have to get them out of power to make life better for trans people. But you also can’t make life better by playing ridiculous games like this one and expecting them to just give up on persecuting trans people.

42

But then what is the point of removing sex from the birth certificate if transphobes can just look at some other set of documents to determine if you are trans?

43

The individual probably has more influence on the content of the “other documents” than they do on a birth certificate.

44

The thing is, without some kind of unique ID number, every little bit of data helps, yes even sex, when you’re trying to identify people and reconcile records in systems. Sex is actually surprisingly helpful, in that if its accurate, you can first-pass rule out half the set, if you know the sex of the person you’re trying to match.

I suspect from that perspective, trans people’s records are absolute headaches for the IT people tasked with trying to line up Nicholas/Nikki’s records without some sort of SSN or unique ID.

45

That’s one possibility. Another possibility is that they might back down, rather than pissing off everyone in an entire State, especially a swing State. I don’t see any reason to feel certain about which way it would go.

It’s not like it’s unheard of for Trump to back off an unpopular policy; just today he rescinded the Federal funding freeze that was rolled out with great fanfare just a few days ago.

46

If the concern is that a branch of government is acting irrationally, I don’t know that pointing to previous actions by government does anything to support or attack the allegation. It’s just a non-sequitor.

Personally - if we take me as a rational actor - I would take a request to remove race a bit more seriously. Race isn’t something that’s rigorously defined. To the extent that it is, the definition is pretty arbitrary (detailed below). Due to the previous, it’s not clear that it serves a useful role in identification.

At the moment, the US defines the following races (as an example - not intended to serve as the list of values that may have been present on birth certificates):

  • American Indian or Alaska Native
  • Asian
  • Black or African American
  • Hispanic or Latino
  • Middle Eastern or North African (MENA)
  • Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander
  • White

Asian includes Michelle Yeoh, Kumail Nanjiani, and Yul Brynner - they have drastically different appearances. Africa possibly has the most diverse set of physical characteristics of any regional area.

If you’re the child of Michelle Yeoh and Idris Elba, what race are you?

In terms of identification, the ideal would be that you have descriptors where, if you have multiple, independent people walk into a room full of hundreds or thousands of babies and bucket those babies by descriptor, that each person would make the same selections.

I’d want to see things like eye color, hair color, relative skin shade, bone ratios, epicanthic fold or no, penis or vagina, presence/absence of limbs, etc. Those are things that would be relatively replicatable. Maybe “race” could pass but I’d be skeptical of its success rate past some easy cases.

47

Because a judge made him do it, no? Of course, he is pretending it was his idea, but that’s because Trump can’t admit ever being wrong about anything.

If only that were true of people who suggest policies like this one! I’m sure it’s just super popular with the electorate.

48

Well, say rather that it’s an identification record generated within the medical realm.

49

Name six.

There are certainly cases in which your doctor should treat you differently depending on your sex. There are cases in which potential lovers might treat you differently depending on your sex. There are cases in which your dance or gymnastics or other physical exercise teacher might treat you differently depending on your sex. There are cases, depending on your social group, in which your friends, family, and/or religious group might treat you differently depending on your sex.

But the government?!

I would prefer if the government managed to keep prisoners safe from each other and from guards, whatever the genders of everyone involved.

But, if they’ve got to have entirely separate prisons (and still, I gather, not accomplish the supposed purpose), I don’t see how having birth certificates state sex would have anything to do with it. The person AMAB may not be remotely presenting that way at the time when they’re incarcerated, and if not is going to be in at least as much danger in a male prison as someone AFAB and presenting as female.

I don’t actually see why my sex is relevant for either of those purposes. It may have been partially useful as part of a description for identification way back before photos were on these things. I don’t see why it needs to be there now. My eligibility for a passport, or for a drivers’ license, shouldn’t depend on my sex or gender; and, so far, in Pennsylvania it doesn’t.

Very close to half the population appears identifiable at birth as male or female. “Part of nearly half the population of the planet” is not very useful for identifying an individual.

Which is clearly massively unfair to those identified as men.

That’s a reasonable point. However it’s not always related to sex on the birth certificate. (For that matter, not everyone with one or the other is fertile.)

Of course it won’t. There is no single quick easy answer which will solve that issue. There are individual things which may help some or which may or well hurt some. Refusing to do anything which may help some because it won’t on its own solve the whole problem is not, IMO, a useful technique.

The prison may have a reason to. Presumably prisons have some sort of physical exam on entrance, so they don’t dump dying or seriously contagious people into the general population? When they do that exam, they can usually determine what sex the person appears as at the time of admittance, which is far more what the issue is than what sex they were at time of birth. If they can’t so determine as part of a routine medical exam, then a prison rigidly divided into male and female is going to be a problem for that person in any case, and a guess taken at birth isn’t going to help. (The problem may exist, of course, even if the exam does determine apparent sex, if the exam is going entirely by genitals.)

TL/DR: having the sex as it was on the birth certificate in no way solves the prison problem.

50

…why six?

51

Good question. That’s just what came into my head at that moment.

Name some, then. So far all we’ve got is the prison issue, which applies only to people who go to prison (or at least to jail), and for which having sex apparent at birth on the birth certificate seems unnecessary in most cases and the reverse of useful in others.

52

Can you stil do that? I am honestly not sure. If you still can, that right will very soon be taken away. What do you suggest we do then?

So trans people not only have to put up with with governmnet documents that do not match their sex and being treated as their sex by the government in other ways.

First, a transition from the sex listed on your birth certificate is not necessary if there is no sex listed on your birth certificate. Second, no I am not saying that the government should destroy all records. What specific records are you thinking of?

More or less, yes.

Again, you have left out any actual reason thus would happen. You just stated that it would happen without actually giving any reason why.

No, not remotely. I just explained why.

Why can’t we make life better by taking sex of birth certificates?

I never expected that. I expected to block certain legal attacks. That is all.

Exactly

Exactly, again

My point was that the government used to include that information on birth certificates. Then they stopped. Why can’t they do the same with sex? Unless, all tranistioning is made illegal (which may happen) we end up with people whose appearance, and possibly genitals do not ‘match’ their legal sex.

I would have replied sooner, but a call came in.

53

The birth certificate thing is a red herring. Again, it doesn’t matter if we are talking about a birth certificate or some other documents. Either the government does track “this person was AFAB but went through the legal process and now identified as male”, and that info is available to transphobes in one way or another; or the government does not track anything like this, and sex is always just a free response.

As for cases where I think the government has a legitimate interest in tracking this info, some examples include:

Sports - especially college sports run by the government and subject to Title 9 protection

Certain government grants intended to counter disadvantages borne by cis women, as well as grants that specifically target trans people

Law enforcement - as noted this includes prisons, it also includes the very rare scenarios where a bad actor might try to abuse the transitioning process

And finally, note that non government groups running spaces that are segregated by gender for physical reasons may also take interest in the government keeping accurate records, as they may rely on those records to make their own determination. For example, sporting federations.

54

Bring the right back, or fight for it not to be removed.

That is a very dishonest snip of my post that flips my point completely around. I was in no way saying that it doesn’t matter trans people not being able to get matching documents doesn’t matter, which is what your snip and response imply. I hope that this was an honest mistake.

What? I explained it precisely. The hypothetical law says the passport can only be issued with a gender matching the birth certificate; therefore a valid passport cannot be issued for people whose birth certificate has no gender.

What further clarification do you need?

Because no one’s life is hard due to sex on a birth certificate.

55

They can write a law that tells the doctors to issue birth certificates with a tarot reading of the baby’s future. So long as they get enough legislators to vote and don’t get a veto, they can do whatever they want.

What they can do is not relevant to the question of what they should do.

What it says on your birth certificate is what it says on your birth certificate. It’s documenting your appearance at birth.

Your legal sex may default to the value given on your birth certificate but it may also be a thing that you can apply to change or a thing that’s not considered to be stored as anything other than a “at this moment in time” sort of metric.

If I’m trying to resolve a potential case of identity theft, and I have a birth certificate that says “male”, but the two people I’m investigating as the possible real person and the possible fraudster both present as female then I can ask a doctor to test the person and see if either is genetically male, has signs of sex change surgery, etc. I am much more likely to positively identify the person who is associated to that birth certificate and correctly arrest the fraudster.

What it says on your birth certificate is no more meaningful than a photograph. In your teens, you had a big blond afro that, because your hair is so thin, just made you look bald. Now you have a better haircut. The photo from your teens is still an accurate record of that time and a photo from today is an accurate record of today. Perhaps, to you, the old photo is embarrassing, but it is still the reality and potentially useful to have a record of.

We don’t always get to hide the most embarassing things about ourselves and, just as often when we try to do so, we’re mostly just harming ourselves in the attempt. It’s in your own interest to be able to more easily and practically establish your identity.

56

How exactly is it a red herring? The transphobic laws I mentioned earlier depend on a birth certificate that lists sex.

I disagree.

That is why I disagree.

I am not sure if this a false dichotomy or an excluded middle. Either way, there are more options than ‘sex on birth certificate’ and ‘the government does not track sex at all’

Additionally

Again, I feel confident stating that very soon there will not be a legal process to change your legal sex.

Again, there are other ways to track a person’s legal sex than birth certificates.

Again, what specifically do you suggest? What actual actions should we take? “Bring the right back” is a goal. You have not told us what specidfic actions or steps should we take to achieve that goal?

You asked (presumably rhetorically) “So what?” That is the what. A trans person’s actual sex will not match the sex on their birth certificate. In Trump’s America, the sex on a birth certificate cannot be changed.

Again, you just give your idea of what would happen. That is not the only possible outcome, Nor is it a certain outcome. If Pennsylvania takes sex off birth certificates, how long before California and other states do the same? Will the government deny that many Americans passports?

I doubt that was true in the past. It is certainly false going forward. Again, in Trump’s America the sex on your birth certificate is your legal and unchangable sex for life. Are you actually saying that won’t make any one’s life hard?

For the third time in this post, in Trump’s America the sex on your birth certificate is your legal and unchangable sex. If you have a solid argument on why the next President, the next wave of Senators and Representatives, and the justics of the Supreme Court will not continue the bigotry- I would very much like to hear it. It probably belongs in another thread. But, I would very much like to hear it.

If somebody has had gender affirming surgery, they’re going to need a DNA test to establish that it really is their birth certificate.

Also,

We are not talking about a bad phot or embarrassing hairdo. We are talking about a lifetime of the government treating you as a wrong sex. Besides hiding the usual things to prevent yourself from being insulted, intimidated, assaulted or killed- you can no longer show most people any government document without revealing you are trans.

57

Where, in the law, does it say that they will treat you as what it says on your birth certificate? Where in the law does it say that you can’t change that law?

No one is saying that people can’t change their gender. Having a blank document as a birth certificate makes it useless for identification and the closer you get to that stage, the worse off you will be.

It’s just not the correct place for this particular intervention.

58

No one? Really???

59

Because those same laws could target any other document, if that document unlocked the secret to whether someone is trans or not. Unless, like I said before, the government doesn’t keep any record of someone’s assigned at birth gender.

And that’s a problem. The problem is if the government doesn’t let you change your sex, ever. The problem is not that the government tracks sex assigned at birth.

Win elections, by no longer turning off huge portions of the electorate with braindead ideas like taking gender off the birth certificate, so that we can pass legislation that protects trans people.

Playing idiotic games like telling people “trans rights activists are not attacking the very concept of gender, that’s a ridiculous right wing lie. Now, let’s remove gender from the birth certificate” will do nothing but win the transphobes more votes.

You’re pretending that the question was “Trans people will not be able to get documents showing their preferred gender”, which is not the question I was responding to.

I specifically said “so what” in reaction to the idea that you have no say as to what your sex assigned at birth is. That’s true, but it doesn’t mean that sex assigned at birth isn’t a relevant; a cis person doesn’t pick their sex either, and neither a sex nor a trans person chooses their (matching/non matching) gender identity. Choice has nothing to do with it.

Pretending that I said “so what” about trans people not being able to update that gender afterwards, when I repeatedly said that they should be able to do that in that very post, is quite off-putting.

I would be against the governments of all blue states no longer tracking sex assigned at birth. I would consider that a bad thing.

Likewise, I consider not being able to change one’s legal sex to be a bad thing.

What makes your life hard in that scenario is living under a government that doesn’t accept the reality that trans people exist. Are you actually saying that the multitude of issues caused by living under such a government as a trans people would be resolved by taking gender off of birth certificates?

Yep.

60

In this thread? Can you quote the person who is saying that???