Gender on birth certificates has been in the news lately. Tasmania is looking to make it optional or remove it and meeting with some opposition
I also oppose gender on birth certificates. I don’t see the value it serves and it may not even be accurate. For starters “Gender” does not actually seem to appear on any State or Territory Birth Certificates. In contrast “Sex” does. That makes the information a little less prone to error. Gender, which is more about social and cultural differences could have an error rate as high as 5% compared to sex which may have an error rate around 1%.
Other information on birth certificates have a much lower error rate. Date and location are usually fairly accurate. Parents identities are fine as long as they don’t expect the father to be a biological parent, which may also be prone to error.
Anyway why to we need to record all this stuff? A bit of googling around and I got the impression that it was about rights discrimination, segregation and identity. Way back when birth certificates became a thing, men and women had different rights so I guess it was important to record sex in case someone tried to gain access to more rights than they were legally entitled to. But is this still the case? Aren’t men and women legally equal now? It also seems that having “sex” on birth certificates makes life difficult for those who reject the sex on their birth certificate as it doesn’t match their gender, or their biological sex when measured genetically. If sex on birth certificates had a best before date, I think we would be well past that date and should throw it out. Also featuring on birth certificates, Place of birth, was important for establishing citizenship, which gave citizens more rights than non citizens. Sadly this is still the case. And Date of birth was important as how many years you existed determined whether or not you had certain rights and responsibilities, rather than your moral, physical, intellectual and emotional maturity. Sadly this is still the case too. Of course we love to celebrate the anniversary of our birth and we need to verify our date of birth if we are to feature as the oldest person in the Guinness World Records or receive a telegram from the Queen on turning 100 years old.
So there’s my argument for removing sex from birth certificates. It serves no purpose and causes difficulty for transgender and intersex folk. Perhaps also in my imaginary Utopian future without borders, where rights are earned rather than gained by waiting for the earth to revolve around the sun enough times, we can remove dates and location from birth certificates also.
Annie Mundy