Striking gender (sex) from brith certificates. At what point is the line drawn?
This seems to be getting way out of hand. Where is the line drawn between legitimate human rights issue and needless litigation?
I haven't looked on mine, but I'm pretty sure the birth certificate identifies sex, not gender, which is a physiological certainty. Except in the rare case where sex is not identifiable. Gender is not identified, so they are arguing the wrong thing. I know my driver's license lists sex.
Not even going to ask what is up with the "only spells her name in lower case" thing.
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After successfully lobbying provincial and federal governments to make it easier to amend sex designations on key identity documents, transgender Canadians are now pushing for another change: to abolish gender references altogether from birth certificates.
The B.C. Human Rights Tribunal has agreed to review complaints filed by the Trans Alliance Society and a handful of transgender and intersex individuals, who argue that doctors should stop assigning the sex of a baby based on a quick inspection of the baby’s genitals at birth when there’s a possibility they may identify under a different gender, or no gender, years later.
“Birth certificates (may) give false information about people and characterize them in a way that is actually wrong, that assumes to be right, and causes people … actual harm,” said Morgane Oger, a transgender woman in Vancouver and chair of the society.
“It’s considered true and infallible when it isn’t.”
Governments have been receptive in recent years to calls to make it easier for people to change the sex on their personal records. Several provinces, including B.C., Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario and Nova Scotia, no longer require a person to have undergone sex-reassignment surgery before they can request a change to the gender designation on their birth certificates.
Earlier this year, Citizenship and Immigration Canada announced that it, too, would no longer require proof of sex-reassignment surgery in order to change the sex designation on a citizenship certificate. It now will accept an amended birth certificate.
But advocates say the changes do not go far enough because governments are still certifying as true information recorded at birth which they know may be wrong in some cases.
The current regime falsely presumes there are two genders, that genders never change and that you can tell a child’s gender at birth, said Vancouver human rights lawyer barbara findlay, who is representing the complainants and spells her name in all lower case.
“That means that children are raised ‘as’ the birth-assigned gender, which is a crazy-making experience. Instead of living in a social reality that recognizes that gender develops, and does not exist at birth, those children have nothing to work with except that something feels profoundly wrong,” she said via email.
“Getting to the stage of being able to ‘change’ gender is an anguishing process, in which a child often experiences severe pushback from their own families.”
The only way, she said, to know one’s gender identity is to ask that person. “At law, gender identity trumps what is between one’s legs.”
One of the complainants is Harriette Cunningham, a Comox, B.C. girl who was labelled “male” at birth, and was among the first in the province last year to successfully have her gender re-designated on her birth certificate.
According to the complaint filed on her behalf by her parents, Colin and Megan Cunningham, “Harriette was mistakenly assigned the gender ‘male’ at birth. Having any gender marker on her birth certificate has contributed significantly to discrimination based on her gender, at school and in the world.
“Since it is impossible to tell an individual’s gender at birth it is discriminatory to issue a birth certificate with that information on it.”
However, those advocating the elimination of gender designations on birth certificates are likely to face big challenges, said Karen Busby, a University of Manitoba law professor and director of the Centre for Human Rights Research.
Last edited by llwhiteoutll; 05-27-2015 at 08:45 AM.
Considering it's the parents that would be deciding and not an adult capable of making the identification themselves, I don't know if I like this but as long as it's not permanent then I guess it doesn't matter.
Removing it doesn't really matter unless we're talking about statistics...
Yeah, they were saying that Germany changed it, but it's screwing up their record keeping and document processing (like passports and licenses).
As CC mentioned, stats are also important. From things to funding for various programs like education, or figuring out mortality rates, etc.
I'm not against them changing it, but we have to figure out how to rework the areas of the system that will be affected first. Doing it after will be far more costly, time consuming, and painful for all involved.
In a new interview with David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network featured on Tuesday’s episode of The 700 Club, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) warned that the momentum of marriage equality and other LGBT equality advances pose a threat to religious freedom. Specifically, he worried about the impact of categorizing opposition to LGBT equality as “hate speech.”
“We are at the water’s edge of the argument that mainstream Christian teaching is hate speech,” he explained, “because today we’ve reached the point in our society where if you do not support same-sex marriage, you are labeled a homophobe and a hater. So what’s the next step after that, after they’re done going after individuals? The next step is to argue that the teachings of mainstream Christianity, the catechism of the Catholic Church, is hate speech. That’s a real and present danger.”
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“Since it is impossible to tell an individual’s gender at birth it is discriminatory to issue a birth certificate with that information on it.”
However, those advocating the elimination of gender designations on birth certificates are likely to face big challenges, said Karen Busby, a University of Manitoba law professor and director of the Centre for Human Rights Research.
This is incorrect as biologically it's 100% certainty at birth what gender the child is. Yes it's possible to for a person to grow up with a different gender identity but we simply can't start ignoring science. As has been said there's important stats that maintained that require gender differentiation. There are certain health risks that are gender specific from birth on and IMO this is simply going too far.
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Birth, mortality, life span and rate of disease off the top of my head.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Erick Estrada
This is incorrect as biologically it's 100% certainty at birth what gender the child is. Yes it's possible to for a person to grow up with a different gender identity but we simply can't start ignoring science. As has been said there's important stats that maintained that require gender differentiation. There are certain health risks that are gender specific from birth on and IMO this is simply going too far.
I think it could be argued that the term "gender" has evolved over the course of the last x amount of years. Replacing "gender" with "sex" on all identifying documents can accomplish the same thing, but in what seems like a more PC manner.
Identify as whatever you want, but your biological sex is recorded. If you want to change that down the road, go nuts, there are already methods in place now to change that.
At the end of the day a person that was born a man can choose to be a woman but that doesn't change the fact that she will be will share a male's susceptibility to colon cancer. You need to know biological gender (sex or whatever you want to call it) to ensure the medical profession is giving the proper care to patients.
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This whole gender issue seems to get out of hand. We have a genuine mental illness, and its only current treatment is body modification. I really don't think its healthy to push this on kids.
We have these stories of parents making these huge deals because their son or daughter says they are the opposite gender at 5 or 6, and wanting schools and facilities to bend over backwards. I would argue that this behavior of the parents is in the same line of making sure every kid is a winner and don't ever let kids experience defeat because we don't want to scar their egos.
I am not trying to be hateful, I just don't know where it ends, or even what the proper solution is.
At the end of the day a person that was born a man can choose to be a woman but that doesn't change the fact that she will be will share a male's susceptibility to colon cancer. You need to know biological gender (sex or whatever you want to call it) to ensure the medical profession is giving the proper care to patients.
Yeah maybe, but is the treatment/preventative medicine for cancer different for genders?
Striking gender (sex) from brith certificates. At what point is the line drawn?
