For Starters, ‘Unsex’ the Birth Certificate

The moment when a new baby officially becomes a legal person from the state’s view is the filing of a birth certificate. The information on the certificate — the child’s name, parents and sex — stays with a person for life. Choosing a sex using traditional choices sends a child’s life down one or the other path: male or female. But this sex binary ignores everything contemporary science knows about sex, namely that many factors of sex difference — chromosomal, genital and hormonal — make sex a far richer set of possibilities than just male or female. Likewise, contemporary psychology tells us that both masculinity and femininity are specific to each of us.

Marking “male” or “female” on a birth certificate sets children against a yardstick that will measure their conformity to these roles. For intersex children born without clearly male or female genitals, that conformity generates physical violence, with surgical alteration to conform infants’ genitals to “M” or “F,” without knowing if the baby will become a boy or a girl. The birth certificate functions to police and script the lives of both children and the parents. For example, most would consider me a man, but on my child’s birth certificate, my name appears next to “mother” because the state had to put one of her two male parents on that line.

Sex identification may serve some legitimate interests — prescribing appropriate medical treatment, demography, sports, anti-discrimination law. In each of these, the complexity of sex complicates any neat split, as evidenced by the recent case of the female Indian track athlete whose testosterone was too high to compete as “female.” Many, perhaps most, parents would prefer to include the terms “girl” or “boy” rather than “child” on a birth certificate. But none of these engagements require the legal branding of a child at birth.

Over 30 years ago, the Supreme Court said, in a decision called Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan, that the law should be devoid of “fixed notions concerning the roles and abilities of males and females.” Perhaps an important place to start eliminating those fixed notions would be to "unsex" the birth certificate. We might then allow our children to be full humans from birth, so they can grow into adults free to develop their own notions about who they are.

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