Most national ID or identifying documents include a gender marker. This is often known as a 'sex marker,' even though the term is inaccurate. The presence of such markers, especially on birth certificates, contribute to our society’s emphasis on gender as a criterion for assigning identities, roles and responsibilities within society.
With gender being such a determining and dominant identifier, it puts it at the centre of so many arrays of our lives and societal norms and standards. Importantly this categorisation creates a basis for discrimination, and inequality.
The emphasis of gender as an identifier is harmful to all persons who do not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth. Intersex people are also heavily impacted, as babies across the world are facing unnecessary and brutal surgeries just for the sake of them having genitals that will match whatever gender is ticked on a birth certificate.
The lack of fluidity and flexibility in current registration systems and identification systems means that people all over the world face barriers to enjoy their rights to self-determination by not being allowed to be recognised by the gender they self-identify with versus the gender assigned to them (at birth).
This requirement is hugely problematic and bears serious consequences not just for trans people themselves but for society as a whole and our understanding of gender construction. There are many kinds of therapy, treatments and confirmation surgery that trans people may choose to undergo as part of their transition.
They may include facial reconstruction, breast surgery, genital surgery, voice training, hormone therapy, hair removal… None of them is required or expected for people to be valid as the gender they identify with. In fact, many trans people – and trans men in particular – choose not to ever undergo genital surgery.
Expecting people to undergo genital surgery in order for them to have their gender and name recognised equates to a de facto forced sterilisation, as this type of surgery will prevent them from having their own biological children.
Moreover, states that impose surgery as a condition for being able to correct a birth certificate and ID act as if one specific type of genital surgery “makes” someone a woman or a man and thus perpetuate a vision of gender based on an extremely narrow understanding of both gender and biological sex.
As Lisa Jean Moore and Paisley Currah explain in their paper “Legally Sexed – Birth Certificates and Transgender Citizens” (Feminist Surveillance Studies, 2015), which looked at the history of birth certificate correction in the City of New York, requiring surgery also creates inequalities,
as the type of surgery required is often the most expensive one, thus resulting in a situation where only trans people who can afford to transition are allowed to have their birth certificate/ID documents corrected.
All those reasons make requiring surgery a dangerous, privacy invasive and potentially traumatic requirement for trans people who should not have to be forced into a surgery they may not want to have – or be forced to prove that they indeed had such a surgery – in order to have identity credentials which match their gender identity.
Beyond the trans community, this requirement perpetuates a belief that gender is a binary that can be reduced to the shape of a person’s genitals. This requirement also roots itself in the transphobic argument that if changing ones’ gender marker on an ID is available too easily people would use exploit it to commit fraud (Moore and Currah, 2015).
This argument leads to a discourse that trans people are lying about their identity until they prove otherwise and that they should have to endure a long and painful process in order for their gender to be recognised.
Lisa Jean Moore 和 Paisley Currah 在他們的論文 Legally Sexed – Birth Certificates and Transgender Citizens 中，檢視了紐約市在改變出生證性別方面的歷史，並發現要求手術換證造成了不平等，因為這類手術經常是所有選擇中最貴的，因此導致了一種情況——只有能負擔得起的跨性別才能夠更改他們的證件性別。
底下附上部分摘譯