Choosing mom's sex on birth cert

The NY Post reports:

A city Health Department form for new parents requesting birth certificates asks the “woman giving birth” if she’s male or female.

Along with routine questions — mother’s maiden name, mother’s legal name, mother’s Social Security number — is a gender question that has raised a few eyebrows.

And just in case the inquiry is not clear, the birth-certificate request provides a convenient check box and asks the question in capital letters. “What is your DATE OF BIRTH, current AGE and SEX?” the form asks in the section clearly marked “Mother/Parent (Woman Giving Birth).”

“To be clear, it is possible for a person who has given birth to a child to identify as male,” said Susan Sommer, a lawyer for Lambda Legal, an advocacy group for lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgender people.

Sommer said that given various transgender stages, there is room for the person who gives birth to check the male box.

Not to leave the father out, the form asks dads the same question and gives them the same check-box options. Only there’s no “giving birth” notation in that section.

While the “sex” question might baffle some new parents, experts said the birth certificate form was created several years ago and was born out of the marriage equality movement.

This sounds crazy, but it is sure to get worse. In California, two gay men can have a baby, and the two men will be put on the birth certificate as the parents at the time of birth. The standard California form has been changed from having lines for "mother" and "father" to having "mother/parent" and "father/parent". The gays are probably unhappy that one has to be the "mother/parent". Or maybe they like it, I don't know, but the forces of anti-sexism will likely eliminate the term "mother".

They are probably working overtime trying to design a form that has accurate info for the typical cis-gendered parents and not offensive to the LGBTQIA crowd.

California kids can also have 3 or more legal parents, so it seems likely that people will demand all 3 parents on the birth cert. Or 5 or 6 parents, as the case may be. And all those legal parents could have fluid gender and orientation identifications also.

Some people now claim to change genders on a daily or hourly basis. Others deny any gender identification.

It is even possible for a baby to have 4 biological parents: the dad, the nuclear DNA mom, the mitochrondial DNA mom, and the gestational mom. And in California, 2 other gays or lesbians, unrelated to those biological parents, could be the legal parents at time of birth. The woman who gives birth does not necessarily go on the birth cert.

You might think that the birth cert should just factually list who gave birth, and ignore the legal fictions. But that ended long ago, when adoptive parents were allowed to retroactively change the birth cert in order to pretend that they gave birth to the adopted child. That is why some people complained that the birth cert released by President Barack Obama was not the original one. That law also protects anonymous adoptions, so that the child can look at his own birth cert and not even know that he was adopted. Some people think that a child should have the right to know who his natural parents are, as British and German law has indicated, but American public opinion has gone the other way.

Update: Britain has just approved creating babies with 3 DNA parents.