On December 2, 1959, at 10:22 p.m., I was born in the hospital that my great-great grandmother built with oil money 25 years earlier. Both my mother and father were born in this hospital 20 and 21 years before this evening. I am told I was delivered in a blizzard.
A few days ago, I received a crisp new birth certificate stating (contrary to the facts stated above) that it was not George Bailey, a boy, but rather Joyce Bailey, a girl, who was born in that hospital. On the one hand, I am happy to have the document — it is one more piece of paper that legitimizes my existence. On the other hand, I feel a bit odd about it because (let’s face it), that’s not the way things happened.
In the delivery room on that dark December night, as far as anyone present knew, I was a normal newborn boy, and that’s what the attending doctor certified. I have the old certificate, the birth announcements, the blue clothes, to prove it. This boy was surrounded by love and expectations from the beginning, imbued with male privilege and power and family history.
This new document erases that fact and replaces it with something that simply didn’t happen. If my parents’ first-born had been a girl, would she have ended up where I am now, or would social and family expectations be such that she would have aspired to something very different? It’s an impossible thing to consider.
But one doesn’t have to ponder this impossibility — the new birth certificate doesn’t undo my life, but just documents it differently. In the UK, they don’t replace your birth certificate when you’ve changed sex, but they issue a Gender Recognition Certificate, supposedly indistinguishable from a normal birth certificate, and when you think of it, this approach more accurate because it leaves the original document untouched. In other words, there are two birth certificates, the original and the new one. In 100 years, when UK genealogy-hunters go back, they can find that John Barleycorn was born on a certain date and that he became Jane Barleycorn 30 years later. What will my progeny find when they go looking for George’s birth certificate? Nothing but a changeling swaddled in pink and left in the little boy’s place.
If the legal documentation doesn’t leave a trace, then it’s up to us to make the past intelligible through telling our life stories.
November 21, 2008 at 10:49 pm
Not your usual Texan born again story.
Congratulations.
December 23, 2008 at 10:13 pm
Hey, Joyce! Big hugs from up north. You and I are on interesting journeys. Yours is fascinating and I hope to read more.
On the subject of birth certificates. While yours was not altered, mine was. As an adopted kid in 1969, my “birth certificate” reads that my mother, who birthed me, was Lila, and my father was Garland. At the bottom they have placed an “editing” date–in 1970. There is NO “real” birth certificate for me–only this doctored one. This was to cement the fact that legally these are my parents. It nearly erases my original “birth”–I find it a funny piece of “legitimization” to say the least. We’re supposed to use that as proof of who we are. Oddly, I only prove I was edited.
God bless you, Joyce.
December 3, 2009 at 8:05 am
I think it is interesting how we issue a new birth certificate here in the US and they don’t in the UK. It probably has something to do with how our laws work here. Here you are are not a real person without a birth certificate, and while you may go around presenting yourself however you like, your self is not your legitimate self unless it reflects the self on your birth certificate, no matter what all your other legal documentation says. Law is weirdly rigid that way. I wouldn’t think of it as rewriting history. Just confirming the hidden facts. Joyce was born that day. She was just hidded-occluded-by George.
December 3, 2009 at 9:56 am
The relationship to adoption and birth certificates is indeed interesting (as the sealed records for adoption in the US and in some other countries) really do hide what actually happened (and not always with an explicit editing date). My daughter’s US birth certificate asserts that she was born to us, 9 months before we met her and in a place we had never been at the moment she was born. Yet the certificate suggests we were there, and makes no mention of her first parents.
Fortunately we ended up with a copy of the original birth certificate, too, so she will have both stories to tell.
You’re right, though, Joyce: it’s the story-telling that we have to counter the ways in which our own lives don’t always fit with the law’s construction of them.