I tend to follow Jane’s lead. She doesn’t bring it up in casual conversations so I assume she doesn’t want it to be widespread knowledge. And I don’t feel I should be discussing anything about Jane’s life that she doesn’t discuss herself.
This is how I feel, but I’m open to being corrected. If someone had a miscarriage or abortion, we generally know that that’s close-hold information and don’t disclose it without consent under any circumstance. But if Mike’s an alcoholic, to use an example from this thread, and everyone who worked in the office 4 years ago knew about it because he used to come in blitzed and/or hungover 4 days a week, I don’t think Mike should have an expectation of complete privacy about that. “I’ve known Mike since before he got sober!” seems to be in poor taste, but if someone’s like “Why is Mike so surly to me when I ask him out for drinks every Thursday,” saying, “Dude, he’s in recovery” doesn’t seem inappropriate to me.
Likewise, the example in the OP seems tacky, but “Why are all of these old documents signed by a John Grant, is he related to Jane Grant in any way?” Is the proper protocol there to feign complete ignorance about the past? Seems like a stretch to me.
Right. Just like when I tell everyone on this forum your birth name, date of birth, whether you were adopted, your medical history, or your arrest record, when the mods censor my post, it is an Orwellian retconning of the past, rather than a reasonable response to a fairly disgusting and unreasonable invasion of privacy in a social space.
You clearly don’t.
Perhaps you’d have greater empathy if you did.
Changing a birth certificate is hardly fraud. We just changed my daughter’s from M to F. Who does this affect beyond her? It allows her to change her social security marker to female as well. Does every employer need to know she’s trans? Why on earth should they?
You do realize that birth certificates are changed all the time in cases of adoption, right? They aren’t pristine and objective records of any particular set of facts.
It also allows her to live legally as a woman, which is something Darren said he supports. But the path to being able to marry, get a passport, etc. generally lies in changing the birth certificate.
Yeah, I was legally adopted by my stepfather when I was thirteen, and my birth certificate was permanently changed. I was also issued a new social security number. I guess that’s fraud, too.
Darren, If you publicly tell people that your friend was adopted and that friend doesn’t want you saying that, you’re an asshole. LGBT status belongs in the same boat. Dead names most certainly do. If you constantly referred to Hillary as “Ms. Rodham”, it’d be entirely reasonable to call you a dick, and there’s not even any trauma attached there, she just married out of her family name. Your constant comparisons to 1984 completely miss the point. You’re not being asked to forget the past. You’re being asked to not bring up parts of the past that are private and which people quite reasonably don’t want everyone to know about. Refusing that common courtesy doesn’t make you a brave warrior for truth, freedom and integrity. It just makes you a jerk.
Yes, exactly. Changing the birth certificate is what makes her legally female. You can actually get a passport and, in some state’s, a driver’s license, without a legal gender change. But you aren’t legally male or female until your birth certificate says you are. Until we changed her gender marker, she was required to register with Selective Service. Now she isn’t.
It’s hard to explain to those who haven’t experienced it directly or indirectly. But you have to indicate your legal gender constantly. You can’t change your insurance until you change your birth certificate, so she was “Emma” (not really!) and male at the pharmacy every time she had to pick up meds. Etc., etc. Not fun.
If your birth certificate was changed to claim that you had different parents at the time of your birth and a different named assigned to you at the time of your birth, then yes, I conciser that fraud, whether it is legal or not. The past is a fixed fact no matter how much you or someone else might wish it wasn’t.
But as we’ve been telling you, birth certificates are NOT simply records of the past. That’s your assumption and it’s an unfounded one.
Fraud would require an object–who would be the object of this fraud, be it adoption or a gender change?
Lol. I don’t wish it wasn’t, I wish I’d never fucking met the guy. I had no control over how the process was handled. That was a decision made by the state government (or possibly federal - not sure who has jurisdiction over that part of adoption law.)
I’m just pointing out that the government disagrees with you.
Not fraud. This is pretty much how all adoptive birth certificates are handled. There is nothing on my birth certificate that even says it was amended. (Note that I was brought home from the hospital two days after my birth by my adoptive parents, but I think it’s the same whenever the adoption takes place.)
Indeed.
Really, to me, this is a thread about the appropriateness of gossip. The intimate minefield subject is frankly of arguably less importance (I said arguably, dammit) than the fact of gossiping about someone who is not present. When I hear gossip like this, I assume that the gossiper is quite capable of sharing intimate information about me when I am not around. I categorize the gossiper as untrustworthy and watch what I say around them.
Although I suspect it’s very different if you’re trans. It would be like someone had innacurately recorded the wrong sex at birth and you’ve spent your whole life trying to convince others the doctors made a mistake. Consider, Darren, that your birth certificate had claimed you were female, and that it’s so obviously wrong that you’ve made multiple efforts to correct the error, only to be accused of fraud when you attempt to correct the mistake. Try not to think about genitalia for a moment, just imagine that everyone under the fucking sun has been telling you since birth that you are female, including your government, and you damned well know better, and then someone accuses you of trying to retcon the past when you try to set the record straight. That’s the emotional gist of what we’re dealing with.
A birth certificate is not some sort of immutable “record of the past.” It is a legal identifying document. If it needs to be changed, there is a process to change it.
In what way is that fraud? Who is being defrauded in that situation?
Do you feel the primary purpose of a birth certificate is to act as a historical record? Or is its primary purpose to be a legal document to make it easier for a citizen to establish their identity and access rights and resources to which they’re entitled? Have you given any consideration to the difficulties a person may face if their legal documentation doesn’t match the gender in which they’re trying to live? Does your interest in preventing “fraud” (again: how? Against whom?) override your concern for trans people dealing with these difficulties? Lastly, speaking purely in terms of the documents value as a historical record: which do you think would be more confusing for future historians: a document that so-and-so had a son, which completely vanishes from the historical record after they under go gender transition, or a document that says so-and-so had a daughter, which can easily be linked to that child’s post-transition life as a legally recognized woman?
I guess my friend who was adopted should NOT have had a new, “fraudulent” birth certificate created, and just not had a legal birth certificate at all? How do you think she could go through life with no birth certificate (it was a closed adoption, so the original was available, as it would identify the birth parents)?
Not Edited because I was too slow:
(it was a closed adoption, so the original was NOT available, as it would identify the birth parents)?
I think where Darren is getting hung up is in thinking Jane really was John at one time. But she wasn’t ever John in any meaningful sense. Everyone made a mistake in assuming she was John, including whatever ignoramus wrote down "male"on her birth certificate. It happens.
I get that this is confusing, but listening to people talk about their own experiences really helps.
Hey, what else can you do but go by physical attributes at the time of birth? I think the obstetrician is pretty blameless here.