Nov. 2 2012 I received a letter from the California Department of Public Health, Vital Records. In that letter came proof that I was “born again.” I was born female.
You see, the gender listed on my original birth certificate was male, and my name was my given, male name. The gender listed on the birth certificate I received in November was female, and the name was the female name I’d changed my legal name to in 2003: Autumn Violet Sandeen.
The new birth certificate isn’t a revised version of my birth certificate; my new birth certificate in no way indicates it’s a revised birth certificate as revised birth certificates in a number of other states do. There is no difference in document style between the birth certificate issued when I was born and the new birth certificate issued by the California Department of Public Health, Vital Records in late October and delivered to me in early November.
So, 2013 is going to be the first full year I live as a “female-born-female,” or said in the language of some radical feminist lesbians, “womon-born-woman.”
So, 2012 was the year the California court changed my legal gender, followed by a change in my California birth certificate to match my California legal sex. And besides this, 2012 was the year where my gender was changed from male to female within the VA medical system, and 2011 was the year the Social Security Administration (for my Social Security and Medicare records) and the State Department (for my passport) changed my legal sex from male to female.
So for me, 2012 was my real year of bureaucratically experiencing documented womanhood. My New Year’s resolution for 2013 is completing the bureaucratic trek from male to female.
The last government agency at which I need to change my legal sex is the Department of Defense (DOD). As a military retiree, this is the agency that sends me my military retirement check each month; this is the agency that issues me my retired military identification card.
Since I have the documentation which the U.S. Navy states it requires to change the gender in my DOD records, my change of legal gender from male to female in their system will almost assuredly occur in 2013.
This coming Feb. 6 will be the tenth anniversary of my living as Autumn, so it will have taken just about 10 years to complete my bureaucratic change from male to female. It’s been an arcane and amazing paperwork journey, for sure, and that paperwork journey has been a piece of a rich wonderful life experience I wouldn’t trade for anything.
Sorry, but changing one’s birth certificate does not change historical facts. If a person is born with a penis, and XY chromosomes, then no amount of legal fiction will change them into a “woman born woman.” That is absurd. And, quite frankly, it is my understanding that unless one has had a penectomy, and vaginoplasty, one is still not legally a female, even if one does manage to “pull the wool over a judge’s eyes.” In San Francisco, the instructions from the court make this very clear.
Making such claims simply gives ammunition to those who would like to see the right to change birth certificates for those who have actually changed sex repealed.
This column belongs in the paper’s fiction section.
Perhaps some day there will be some best selling fiction spring fourth form these pages.
Anne
So, how soon can we expect to hear of you creating a scandal by hanging out in the women’s showers with your shlong hanging out?