Birth certificates can't be changed??

I'd taken it for granted that this was a genuine error (brain-fart, tired, distracted, etc) but two cases in close succession does give you cause for wonder. Either way, these parents deserve a rapid correction.

This is a clear case of two tier birth certificating

Came on to see if there was a thread about this story. Good. Looks very much like the government will take action with the baby’s BC because the errors made are so unacceptable. This is a really good thing.

If this happens then GC people should offer their support to campaign alongside detransitioned people with GRCs, to get the law changed such that a GRC can be revoked on the basis of the person’s consent. At the moment if you get a GRC and then you detransition there is no legal way to remove the GRC. You remain legally of the opposite sex for your whole life. The only way to get your GRC revoked is to say you fraudulently applied for it in the first place (not sure how that would be evidenced). It’s not respectful of people’s dignity to require that they pretend they weren’t acting in good faith, when they were. It should be enough to say officially that you are detransitioning and therefore you want your legal sex to return to the reality of your birth sex.

This is a really unacceptable situation for a little baby who has no understanding of this and has two parents to explain for her. So there is absolutely no way the law should continue to require detransitioned people to legally live out the rest of their lives within a legal fiction that they no longer want to live by.

And the Guardian one in the OP as each have slightly different takes and you get little bits of extra detail from each one:

“In a twist to the tale, Sarah Power, who registered her baby daughter at the same register office – with the same registrar – in October last year, had a similar experience.
“The registrar read back all the details correctly – including that our daughter was female – and then asked us to check the spellings of the name,” she said. “We checked the spelling but not the gender, because the registrar had already said it to us correctly.”

“It was only when we got outside the office door that we looked at the certificate and realised that our daughter had been registered as male.”

Power, however, was able to get a new, corrected birth certificate for her daughter after the registrar directed her to a GPO form. The Home Office, however, say this is no longer an option. ‘The local registration service was advised earlier this year not to issue [corrected] certificates in this way,” they said.”

The registration is an important historical document for the benefit of posterity, and can only be changed in very visible and transparent ways (no Tippex!).

The problem here is with the certificates based on it. The government has decided they have to reflect the registration warts and all, including any corrections.

It's hard to see why, when it just exposes the holder to a lifetime of irritation ('yes, my parents were tired when they registered my birth, ha ha') or worse ('yes, I discovered I had a DSD when I was ten, not that it's any of your business ')

From the Telegraph version

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/11/19/our-daughter-wrongly-registered-boy-birth-certificate/

"Mr Bingham said: “I’ve had a conversation with him [Mr Anderson] and he said he was going to take it up with the minister for children. He said to us it’s a long process and we haven’t heard anything yet.

“I’ve sent him an email going through everything in detail that’s happened.”

He added: “We’ve since had another lady called Sarah reach out to us who says exactly the same thing happened to her there.

“She also had her daughter registered at the same registry office as us, who had the same mistake.

“She has been able to go back and correct this but we haven’t had this option. The registry office changed her birth certificate. If it can be changed for one, why not for us?

“Apparently the lady who saw us also helped them fill out the form. She told us she had read and proof-read it. It seemed like she was rushing it.

“We could have overlooked the mistake if it could have easily been corrected.”"

Both cases need a full investigation

The inequality is outstandingly stupid.

@MelodyMalone ha ha, yeah, you're not wrong! 🤣

Other way around. Trans people don't have the right to have the (ahem) 'error' in their birth registration corrected, although I'm sure that's what they would have liked.

Am I being too suspicious to suspect an activist registrar causing problems?

For some reason the fact that the couples MP - who kindly has intervened - is one ":Lee Anderson" immediately made me suspect there is a lot to this use of newsprint that isn't being printed.

I thought the sleep deprived mention was that they had failed to immediately notice, not that they'd given the wrong info.

You'd think a registrar with any sense would double check a male child being called Lilah Jane Mary, anyway!

@MelodyMalone in the article the registration seems to place the blame on the parents, and it mentions them being sleep deprived. It says it's from info the parents supply only. They can't exactly ask to look at the kid's genitals.
Not that I think they shouldn't just change it.

Agreed, definitely not the fault of trans people.

But definitely an example of a two tier system where the nebulous quality of 'trans' gives someone else a right that you or I (or this baby) doesn't have, despite really genuine & obvious reasons.

And that's not right.

Not assigned at birth in this case - I'd assume the hospital or wherever baby was born recorded a female child.

Don't think it was the parents' error but the registrars'.

The child was assigned male at birth, so is male. That’s how it works, right? Arguing that sex is observed and registered not assigned is totally transphobic. Or it was yesterday; in Guardian world anything can change depending on what you want to be true today.

How they managed to mark their child as the opposite sex is a bit of a mystery. But I guess it must happen sometimes. Of course the registration place could change it. Why on earth not? Just put down in notes 'error on initial forms- amended to correct sex- female' then just change the certificate? How hard can it be.
They're making her be branded trans from birth even though she's not! So weird and bizarre.

Yes, the process seems to have been devised after a lot of wrangling, partly because the authorities didn't want to treat a gender reassignment as if it was the correction of an error (as had been done for transsexuals before the April Ashley court case) - hence the creation of the Gender Recognition Register. (According to trans friend, the certificates based on the GRR to begin with looked slightly different from a real certificate, thus blowing the gaff as it were. That got changed!)

I get my info from gov.uk and know nothing about genealogy, so would be interested to hear from family history buffs about this. For instance, gov.uk says a marker is put on the original registration linking to the GRR, but I'm unclear whether this is for the public's benefit or just for Registry employees.

In other words, could a clever genealogist find both girl Jane and boy John (all other parameters the same) and, if so, will the system that returned the search results tell him which is which as between the main register and the GRR?

It’s more that apparently immovable bureaucratic procedures don’t seem to be so immovable for people who have a GRC who can get a new birth certificate

whereas it’s apparently impossible to give this child a new correct birth certificate 🤷🏻‍♀️

It's funny how an error like this suddenly, magically, reveals that having your sex wrongly "assigned at birth" is a clerical error wholly consistent with (and indeed entailing) the material reality of actual sex at birth.
<bitter, oh so bitter, hollow laughter>

Crosses my mind it may have something to do with trans issues and an activist being awkward or even doing it on purpose, because sex is 'assigned'?

To be fair this isn't the fault of trans people, even though it does seem ridiculous.

I am hoping that the media attention will lead to an exception made for this bbay.

People with GRCs, otoh, get a clean replacement birth certificate which is not officially linked to the original registration at all.

odd how red tape and bureaucracy flies out the window for a special category of people but something like this which is obviously human error absolutely definitely can’t be done cos bureaucracy

The problem is that the error can be corrected (as can the entry for an individual with a late-diagnosed DSD) but the existence of the error and its correction remain visible both on the register entry (which was always the case) and on any register extract (='birth certificate') based on it. Until recently you could at least get a clean replacement birth certificate incorporating the correction without 'track changes' as it were. Not any more, according to that article.

People with GRCs, otoh, get a clean replacement birth certificate which is not officially linked to the original registration at all.

How infuriating, when everyone agrees there was a mistake and no-one contests the truth. Yet for a fiver and a pinkie promise to 'live as' a certain gender you can change your birth certificate, no probs.