Back in 2021, the American Medical Association (AMA) recommended taking gender off of public birth certificates. I went to ask parents and members of the LGBTQ community what their thoughts on this issue were, especially since this community has been at the forefront of eradicating the biological differences between men and women.
In 2021, the AMA shared that gender needed to be removed from birth certificates because “assigning sex using a binary variable and placing it on the public portion of the birth certificate perpetuates a view that it is immutable and fails to recognize the medical spectrum of gender identity.”
Asking attendees of Arlington’s Pride Parade their thoughts on this, one attendee who identified as a lesbian shared that, “gender doesn’t really do much, it doesn’t really matter.” Another responded that “a baby is a baby at the end of the day,” she then went on to share that, “the terms assigned female at birth and assigned male at birth can be harmful in general.”
A mother, who identifies as “pansexual” shared that, regarding her three-year-old, “If my child doesn’t have to have the gender on his birth certificate, that’d be f*cking awesome.”
She then went on to share that if he wants to become a girl later on, “I’m so for it.”
“I’ll tell him what hospital do you want to go to right now?” she finished.
“I think as a whole, society just needs to stop prioritizing the sex of their child,” one girl who identified as a “trans-man” shared. She then went on to use an example of a parent who thinks their baby boy will remain a boy, “and then we’ll have a baby boy forever, no maybe she’s trans or maybe your little girl is going to grow up and you’re going to have to have a son later,” she stated.
Most of the attendees interviewed agreed that not gendering a child at birth would be beneficial, as assigning them their gender at birth could be “harmful,” a trend that has already been gaining traction for the past couple of years.
Back in 2018, NBC put out a segment titled, “Raising Theybies” in which two parents decided to raise their children as “theybies”, using “they/them/their” pronouns to let their children, “decide for themselves when, if and how they want to identify as a gender,” per the children’s father.
