Revising Birth Certificates

(New York City) Historically, the gender designation on a birth certificate has been a biological determination. An infant is born with either male or female body parts and the birth certificate is annotated accordingly. Well, that may change since the city of New York is seeking to allow changes to birth certificates based solely on personal preference, despite physical anatomy.

From NYTimes.com:

Under the rule being considered by the city's Board of Health, which is likely to be adopted soon, people born in the city would be able to change the documented sex on their birth certificates by providing affidavits from a doctor and a mental health professional laying out why their patients should be considered members of the opposite sex, and asserting that their proposed change would be permanent.

Applicants would have to have changed their name and shown that they had lived in their adopted gender for at least two years, but there would be no explicit medical requirements.

As a result, you could be packing more meat than the Chicago stockyards while having your birth certificate identify you as female ... just because you wanted it so. However, is this proposed rule a good idea?

First of all, this is a brilliant idea! Even as voters are right now at the polls in a number of states deciding whether same sex marriage should be legal, a Board of Health ruling by the city of New York is about to make the issue moot. If marriage is going to be between a man and a woman as attested to by their birth certificates, no problem. Any same-sex couple can easily become an opposite sex couple with the strokes of a few pens. Granted, a doctor and a 'mental health professional' have to be involved but that provision is not considered a significant hurdle.

However, if one views the birth certificate as a legal document which provides an historical record of the birth of a child, its pedigree as a snapshot of information at a point in time is lost. Also, if one can simply change gender by a pen, what's to prevent other data on the birth certificate from being modified? Taken to an extreme, it's conceivable that a child could be born as an Asian male and, after revising the birth certificate, later become a Caucasian female.

Furthermore, if the birth certificate can be revised, why not allow the death certificate to be revised? It's possible that a close relative of a dead man might want the coroner's determination of suicide to be changed to natural causes. After all, if the birth certificates are to be meaningless with regard to birth, it seems logical to make death certificates meaningless with regard to death.