Virginia bill allowing new birth certificate for transgender people heads to governor’s desk

The state legislature recently passed a bill that will allow transgender individuals to receive a new birth certificate, something advocates said will help transgender people acquire documentation in alignment with their identity. Senate Bill 657, sponsored by Sen. Jennifer Boysko, D-Fairfax, will allow a person to receive a new birth certificate to reflect the change of sex without the requirement of surgery. The individual seeking a new birth certificate also may list a new name if they provide a certified copy of a court order of the name change.

The bill requires proof from a health care provider that the individual went through "clinically appropriate treatment for gender transition." There is not a standard approach for an individual's transition. Treatment could include counseling, hormone therapy, sex reassignment surgery or a patient-specific approach from the medical provider.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/02/male-and-female-what-is-it-like-to-be-intersex

Is anyone here aware that people are born with both genders yet neither one is fully developed and dominant enough to make that person look all male or all female. I have known several. One I went all through school with, being raised as a girl. She also had a penis. They didn’t do surgery or hormone therapy on her, this was back in 1950s and 60s. She was born mostly female with underdeveloped male organs.

Another one I knew in our LaMaze class when we had our first baby. They were going to raise her as a girl and wait till she was going through puberty to decide which one she was more likely to be, male or female.

Another one I knew in our son;s 3rd grade class. Bonnie was being raised as a girl. She looked like a boy in a dress. Her hormones were strictly male and she got into fights all the time. She sure had a lot of testosterone for a girl.

Another one was my 4th grade teacher. She got married but couldn’t have a baby because she was more male than female. I do remember she had facial hair, and definitely a mustache. She was very nice. Her husband was very feminine, but I don’t think he had a gender birth defect.

I knew a gal with two of everything. Two uteruses, two sets of Fallopian tubes. She found out when she went to doc to get birth control pills, when she was getting married. Yes, that is the way we did it back then. No we were not prudes, but we did wait till we got married. Most of us. There were a few girls who got PG then got married, so there were some OOps uh oh moments! This gal had no trouble getting PG and having babies.

Anoter gal was born WITHOUT a uterus. She was unable to have babies.

Our granddaughter was born with one large U shaped kidney. The right side was OK, the left side was not functioning at all. She also had a tethered spine.

Birth defects do happen.

It is about time the babies born transgender can have a birth certificate to match however they turn out.

There was a couple on TV. One of them looked more male. The other looked more female. Both were born both sexes. Thankfully they found each other!

Dawn Vago has grown up with the consequences of having surgery to “correct” an intersex variation as a child. Now 35, she is genetically male but has always looked entirely female. She has CAIS, complete androgen insensitivity syndrome: her body has XY chromosomes but is unable to respond to male sex hormones, so she developed female genitalia. Internally, she was born with testes instead of ovaries, and no uterus.

Warm and self-assured, Vago lives in Cheshire when she’s not working as an entertainer on a cruise ship. She is one of only a few British intersex people prepared to speak publicly on the issue. “My parents were told not to tell me, that I wouldn’t understand and I wouldn’t fit into society if I knew the shameful secret about myself,” she says. “They wanted me to live an open and honest life, so they told me when I was five years old.” Dawn’s parents were told by doctors that she would get cancer if her testes weren’t removed, so she had a full gonadectomy aged eight. “They said I would not survive puberty if I did not have the operation, and that wasn’t true.”

The advice regarding the cancer risk has since changed; it is now thought to be minimal and to affect adults, not children – meaning the decision to remove the testes or ovaries can be left until people are old enough to make it themselves. Vago says the synthetic hormones she now has to take have left her with a higher risk of developing breast cancer than she would have had of developing testicular cancer. “Because my body wasn’t receiving the healthy hormones that it would have produced, and through mismanagement of my synthetic hormones, my body started to deteriorate.” By the time she was in her mid-20s, Vago had developed osteoporosis and broken 11 bones. She believes choices about medical intervention, be that surgery or hormones, should be left until the individual is old enough to make an informed decision.

Doctors said I’d never find a man to love me and have my own family. I adore that I’m married and starting a family

Vago is living proof that intersex people can live successful lives while being open about being born outside traditional male and female categories. We’re speaking a few days after she has had a bid to adopt approved. “Doctors told my parents that I would never find a man who would love me, and I would never have my own family. I absolutely adore the fact that I am married and about to start a family. It proves you control your own life.”

ack’s parents knew he was different before he was born, when a routine scan couldn’t determine if he was a boy or a girl. Juliet was referred to a consultant at the local hospital, followed by meetings with geneticists and neonatologists, blood tests and an amniocentesis. She was told her baby was genetically male, but that this didn’t necessarily make him a boy. “It was very hard. I’d just assumed that XX is girl and XY is boy,” Juliet says. “Because people don’t know there are variations, when they occur it’s a freakish thing. But actually, he is just a normal child.”

Bouncing around the living room of their home in the West Midlands, Jack looks completely ordinary. With mousy, curly hair, a runny nose and a toothy smile, he clambers over Juliet and chucks a green football at me, oblivious to what his mother is telling me.

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“My entire pregnancy, I’d worried that I wasn’t going to be able to love my baby because it wasn’t a he and it wasn’t a she,” she recalls. But when Jack was born, he was blue and floppy. “Although it was awful at the time, it was the best thing that could have happened: I would have done anything to have made sure he was breathing again.” Her eyes fill with tears. “Quite quickly, he was crying. The relief was unbelievable. He was a baby and he needed feeding. Making sure that he was cared for was my priority, not poking around in his nappy.”

When it comes to wider public awareness of what it is like to be intersex, there is almost none. While the transgender rights movement gathers momentum, and a growing number of people are choosing to identify as “non-binary” – neither male nor female – those who are born outside the physical categories of male and female sex have found it more difficult to have their voices heard. They are atomised, connected only by condition-specific support groups rather than united under a broader intersex umbrella. The terminology itself is fiercely contested: some find the “disorders of sexual development” label deeply offensive, as it implies a defect rather than a natural state of being. Others, often parents like Juliet, prefer DSD and reject the label intersex as “negative and sensationalising”.

My life without gender: ‘Strangers are desperate to know what genitalia I have’
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But a movement is beginning to emerge. Social media has presented fresh opportunities for older people to connect, seeing their difference as variations to be embraced rather than defects to be corrected. A new generation is campaigning so that children born like them aren’t forced into biological categories: either socially, by being made to identify as male or female on birth certificates and other official paperwork; or on the operating table.

The sex on a baby’s birth certificate is generally based on what their genitals look like, but this is only part of what makes a boy a boy and a girl a girl: there are also the ovaries or testes, the mix of hormones, the pattern of the chromosomes. Variations in any of these physical characteristics means bodies don’t fall into the binary categories that make up conventional sex definitions. Sometimes these variations can lead to medical complications, such as infertility or hormone imbalances, but most intersex babies are physically healthy. Not all have ambiguous genitalia, and some don’t discover their condition for years: girls with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (CAIS) might not realise they are genetically male until they reach their teens and their periods don’t arrive.

“Normalising” surgery to make very young children look more typically male or female has been standard practice for decades. Malta became the first country to outlaw non-consensual medical interventions on intersex people (including those too young to give informed consent) in 2015. In January this year, the Chilean government issued guidelines to doctors opposing corrective surgery, allowing them to refuse a parent and not face legal consequences. The parents of an adopted intersex boy are currently suing doctors and social services in South Carolina in the United States for removing his penis and testes at 16 months, even though it was not medically necessary – potentially opening the floodgates for future litigation. But in the UK, US and Australia, there is currently no national law or guidance on corrective surgery: it is up to the individual hospital or practitioner to decide.

For the Swires’ doctors, there was no question as to whether or not Jack should have surgery. “It was assumed that we would do certain things the whole way along,” Juliet says. “We weren’t given an option.” Their neonatologist was “very confident that operating on children to make them more normal was the right thing to do. His confidence gave us confidence.”

One doctor described it as your baby being born with an extra nose on their face. Would you leave it there, or fix it?
After blood tests to confirm Jack’s genetic makeup and assess his hormones, and scans to look at his internal organs, it was decided that he should be assigned male. But the scans turned out to have given a false result: when he was nine months old, Jack was discovered to have a uterus and fallopian tubes, albeit ones that could never produce children. These were immediately removed, because doctors said they posed a high risk of malignancy and cancer; he has had two further operations that will make him pass more easily as male. (“If you imagine labia – they stitched that together,” Juliet explains. “They called it ‘zipping it up’.”) At the same time, they corrected Jack’s hypospadias, a condition that meant his urethra opened at the base of his penis, moving it further up so he could pee more like a boy. He has further operations to come.

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