The right to change personal information on a document issued by the government

[JellySlice]

Interesting article in today's Times. I only have a paper , so can't link it, but perhaps someone with a subscription could post a share token for the Law Report: No right to have residence permit amended for suicidal tendencies.

Essentially, a refugee was granted indefinite leave to remain and issued with a Biometric Residence Permit giving a date of birth which he disagrees with. He wants to change the date of birth, and is on hunger strike over the government's refusal to do so.

I struggle with the legalese, but these paragraphs stand out, and are quite clear:

What is the feminism angle on this?

Changing the sex marker on your passport because you believe you are a different sex from your biological sex is not considered inaccurate or misleading.

But changing your birthday is.

That's really interesting. So from what I have read the line is that the person wants a date of birth that can't be true. And we mustn't falsify records.

Except sex, it doesn't matter if that is accurate.

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/no-right-to-have-residence-permit-amended-for-suicidal-tendencies-28dwzz3cr
That is really interesting, particularly for self id.

An entire law was created to change the definition of sex so that people could have the opposite sex, a demonstrable lie, on their birth certificates.

The equivalent in this case would be to create a law that redefines time, so that people can rewrite historical fact the way biological fact has been rewritten.

It never stops being terrifying that it was allowed to legally rewrite the meaning of what it is to be male and female. I will never stop feeling horrified by this. We have a law that lies not just about the sex of 5000 people, but about the sex of every human being. The law forces a denial of sex, and engineers the state of being male or female into a matter of psychology alone.

We passed a law that denies observable, known material reality and replaced it with pure fiction. And we've spent every moment since putting in place forced measures to try to maintain the fiction's supremacy over the material reality which simply cannot be ignored.

The scale of this insanity terrifies me.
We went ahead and legislated that everyone should be legally forced to pretend something we all know not to be true, and that non-compliance would be punishable.

There was also that Dutch bloke ( think he was Dutch haply to be corrected) who wanted his age changed to reflect the fact a dr said he had the body of a man 20 years younger. The interview with him and someone else I better not name was interesting to say the least. Needless to say his request was refused on the basis of- who did his mum give birth too and parents raised if not him?

What were the dates? Would they make him younger ie a minor? What’s the benefit.

@Barracker

"The scale of this insanity terrifies me.
We went ahead and legislated that everyone should be legally forced to pretend something we all know not to be true, and that non-compliance would be punishable."

It could not be any more Orwellian. Scary times.

What is the feminism angle on this?

That there is (of course) no right to change information recorded on a government document. Except if you want to change your accurately recrded sex on your birth certificate.

Pension schemes would be fucked if we're allowed to self-id to whatever age suits us. For starters.

He was in his 60s. No benefit to him really. But the interviews were interesting in particular with who else was there and how they had to try and convince people how ot wasn't wasn't same thing.

I remember tv giving air time too , to that women who had been taking is it melatonin? Stuff to make her skin darker , her husband/boy friend had been taking it too. She was attempting to talk all stereotypically but was dreadful and u couldn't understand a word she said she liked reggae and Jamaican food or something cant believe tv humoured it tbh

Wow that's a really interesting ruling and the correct one I would say. So why has sex been treated differently? The exact same criteria about reflecting accurate records applies there too.

The same reasoning used in that article are essentially the same as that used for changing sex on govt documents. It would be interesting to see a TRA argue why changing one but not the other is permitted.

It has been ova in that one case where the person wanted their child's birth certificate to basically claim they had no mother.

I dont know how ones ok but thr other not its bizarre

There have been threads here about birth certificates and the importance of not amending them (except in the case of egregious error) because they're a gateway to registration and human rights.

Didn't the European Court of Human Rights have some influence on the change in UK law that led to the GRA? Something about it being a breach of a person's human rights to refuse to legally recognise their sense of identity?

This is a more tenuous change than changing the sex marker. In this case a date of birth was assigned to the individual, as no facts were probable. This is what he wants changed. But the state considers such a change to be unacceptable because it is not supported by evidence... inaccurate ...misleading ...overwhelmingly overridden by the public interest in accurate and evidence-based records.

With sex, the facts are provable, not assigned. A person's sense of gender identity may be a sincerely held belief, but it is not probable in any way. Yet changing documentation in the case of sex is not unacceptable because it is not supported by evidence... inaccurate ...misleading ...overwhelmingly overridden by the public interest in accurate and evidence-based records?

Every 'probable' in my previous post was meant to be proveable.

(Autocorrect and phone )

@Whatwouldscullydo

There was also that Dutch bloke ( think he was Dutch haply to be corrected) who wanted his age changed to reflect the fact a dr said he had the body of a man 20 years younger. The interview with him and someone else I better not name was interesting to say the least. Needless to say his request was refused on the basis of- who did his mum give birth too and parents raised if not him?

www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/amp/world-europe-46133262

This Dutch guy?

And there's this one (might be the same as the pictures article above)

www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/amp/uk-england-bristol-55659423

The second case is more complicated as he believes that the home office "re-aged" him and that he was always the age he believes that he is. It's meant that when he applies to jobs he has to state a date of birth that he believes is wrong. His whole identity is thus being challenged by a date of birth that is not "his".

The first guys in Holland knows that he's not really the age on his birth certificate, but just feels younger and believes that he is subject to age discrimination.

Yeah its the first one

Emile Ratelbrand

Call me old fashioned, but nobody should ever be legally allowed to change their birth date or their sex marker on an official document.

What's fascinating about that clip is watching Victoria Derbyshire, a fully paid up KoolAid drinker and often unpleasant member of the 'because I say so" club.

She knows that one impossible identity is 'allowable' and the other is not. She's actively bristling at her own cognitive dissonance. She's accepted one ludicrous claim and rejects the other and all her offended rebuttals don't make sense. The two situations are very analogous. She's accepted the first because she's accepted that material sex is evil/imaginary gender replaces it and is good. She knows that's what she's compelled to believe. Noone has yet normalised the concept that other material realities are evil and must be replaced by an imaginary facsimile. She's been told 'these rules apply to sex but to nothing else' and she knows her role is not to understand why but to just accept.

It makes her angry.

This makes me wonder. It isn't just that the new rules are deny reality/accept the replacement.

It's that there are people - other people, not her- who decide the rules and when they do or don't apply and it doesn't need to make sense.

It's that these "suspend reality" rules will apply in only the characteristics that are determined by authority, and NOT in others. It's that seeking to understand why the principle makes sense on one but not the other is wrong. You are not meant to understand. It's disconcerting to see that the rules don't make sense and you were never supposed to demand that rules did.

The end game is to have people willingly forfeit their right to understand for themselves, and to accept that obedience is better than understanding.
People are required to willingly agree not to question or understand, but to wait to be told what is true and what is not. It's to accept that reality is what some other authority has determined it is and it is not for the little people to understand or question.

It's like a psyops exercise where you are rewarded or punished at random and the objective is to stop you even trying to understand the rules because it doesn't make sense. The only rule you are being trained to accept is 'unthinkingly obey'.

Yes you can almost see the penny drop with them both tbh

I think he answers the questions perfectly exposes exposes flaws in the thinking so clearly whilst simultaneously making a good case

The look on the faces after is priceless

@Whatwouldscullydo

Yes you can almost see the penny drop with them both tbh

I think he answers the questions perfectly exposes exposes flaws in the thinking so clearly whilst simultaneously making a good case

The look on the faces after is priceless

And as usual, the claims about causing harm and distress to trans people is rolled out to try and shut him down. No explanation obviously as to how allowing a change of birth date on a BC makes trans people distressed. It's a basic no-debate tactic.

It's all just a gigantic game of Mornington Crescent.

The willing players expect everyone else to participate and be convincing about it.

Anyone refusing, or deciding it's a rubbish game with no rules makes the players look stupid, condescending and smug. The point of the game is to show you are in and you are superior and others are not.

"I'm pretending that there are rules, and I that I understand them. You feel annoyed because you don't know the rules and I won't explain them. You can't seem to work out the rules but I'm behaving as if there are definitely rules behind this game, so you persevere, getting more frustrated. The truth is that there aren't any rules, but I won't tell you this. I'll just pretend there are and you'll think you're too stupid to have worked them out yet. You'll only start to have fun when you realise this and play along too, pretending that the penny has dropped for you, and keeping up the pretence to others. You'll then feel smug that you're in on the charade, one of the team, in the know. It's all a farce, and we're all pretending together, that's the entire point."