A newborn girl in Sutton-in-Ashfield, England will go through life with the wrong gender on her birth certificate. This is the result of an administrative error when registering the birth, it writes The Guardian. And that mistake cannot be corrected.
They had some nights with little sleep thanks to their newborn daughter, say Grace Bingham and Ewan Murray The Guardianand so they were not very alert when they went to register the birth with the municipality. What they had not noticed: the clerk opposite them who incorrectly had it stated on the birth certificate that their child was a boy.
“We were shocked,” they say. “But we assumed it would be a piece of cake to correct because we noticed the mistake just seconds after it was made.” But that turns out not to be true. “Although the registrar apologized for her mistake – and the regional manager also apologized – it turns out that birth certificates cannot be changed.”
The only option, according to inquiries from Home Affairs and others, is a note in the margins on the original document. But that’s not enough, says Bingham. “People reading a birth certificate can easily miss a small comment in the margin. That means Lilah can be considered a man when she applies for education, her passport, a job – anything for which she needs a full birth certificate.”
Transpersoon
The parents fear that people who do notice correctly will wrongly assume that their daughter is transgender. “Which isn’t a problem if that’s what she wants to be when she’s older, but that’s not the case now. Lilah may also not believe that she was born a girl, but that something strange, biological was going on when she was born. I just feel so guilty. I cry all the time. I’m completely devastated.”
Their story has prompted a member of parliament from their neighborhood to want a change in the law. Whether and how soon that will happen is anyone’s guess.