A newborn baby girl will have to go through life with the wrong sex on her birth certificate after a registrar’s error, which her parents have been told they cannot change.
Grace Bingham and her partner, Ewan Murray, were excited to register their first child at the Sutton-in-Ashfield Registration Office in Nottinghamshire last week. But, after nights of broken sleep, they failed to notice the registrar had written the wrong sex on the birth certificate until after it had been submitted.
“We were horrified but assumed that, as we saw the mistake just a few seconds after it had happened, correcting it would be an easy matter,” said Murray. “But although the registrar apologised for her mistake – and the area manager also apologised – it turns out that birth certificates can’t be changed.”
this article is interesting because it demonstrates that cis people can very easily apply structural thinking to sex assignment - this couple immediately identifies that their daughter, having mistakenly been assigned male at birth by the registrar, will have administrative problems in employment, education, travel, and so on. they pretty adeptly identify the foundational role that sex assignment plays in the administrative and civil functions of a state, and how incorrect sex markers effectively produce a ‘rational’ reason for discrimination within these administrative and civil arenas:
The General Register Office (GRO), which is responsible for administering all civil registration in England and Wales, and the Home Office have both confirmed that Lilah’s birth certificate cannot be reissued, although an amendment can be made in the margin of the original document.
But Bingham said this is not enough. “People reading a birth certificate might easily miss a tiny note in the margin – which means that Lilah could be regarded as male when she applies for school, her passport, for jobs – for everything that she needs a full birth certificate for.”
And given that this was published in The Guardian, this article makes zero mention as to why it’s impossible for this couple to receive an updated birth certificate with correct information (something the author notes was possible to do a year ago), but the reason is obviously transphobia.
Now one might ask why there’s no exception for cis people whose birth certificates were recorded incorrectly at birth, but this reveals the instability of cissexualism. How would you determine who is a cis person with a mistaken birth certificate, versus a trans person who wants to change their mistaken sex assignment record? Sure, you could say well, this is an infant, of course she’s “really” “biologically” female (something the parents argue in the article as grounds for having their child’s birth certificate re-issued), but 1) that certainly can’t be argued for in all cases, 2) ‘biological sex’ is understood by medical doctors as alterable through hormones and surgery, which trans people are often required to undergo in order to change their records, and 3) binary sex assignment is already imprecise and discretionary, particularly if infants have sex characteristics that don’t conform to binary F/M assignment standards (which is part of how the category of intersex emerges, framing this failure to conform to state census categories as a biological defect - and in fact, many intersex people do not discover they are intersex until the onset of puberty or later, at which point they are even less in luck if they want to change their sex assignment - and if they don’t, if they are cis but have sex characteristics that do not conform to cis standards, they will be discriminated against anyway).
Even setting aside the issue of transgender and intersex people for a moment, states fuck up all the time in administration! you’ve probably either experienced this directly or know someone who’s had some kind of record fucked up by the government at some point in their life. If you get married they could fuck up changing your last name, fuck up your disability status, record your social insurance number wrong, print the wrong address on your driver’s license, fail to acknowledge you as a dependent when filing taxes, incorrectly mark you as having graduated when you’re still a student, fuck up your immigration paperwork, record your name wrong during immigration, etc etc into infinity, and this is not even getting into errors that occur when different levels of government pass information between one another. This level of administrative rigidity is purely to punish people who fail to perform cissexualism correctly, and in the case of this couple’s child, the administrative error of the state is imputed to them as a personal failure that she and her parents will now have to deal with for the rest of their lives.
I think the ultimate analysis is not that transphobia will become less precise and hit more “wrong” targets as it expands its reach, but that this is the exact same operational logic as all other liberal state measures - if you encounter a systemic issue, it’s your fault for not avoiding it, fuck you, go away. You’re poor because you’re lazy, you’re unhoused because you’re lazy, you’re disabled because you’re lazy, and your daughter is now administratively transsexual because you’re lazy. In this case, we don’t even need to assume the intentions of the state - they outright say it:
The family complained to the GRO but was told the mistake was their responsibility and could not be fully rectified. “The duty to ensure that information recorded in any particular entry is true is the responsibility of the person providing the information and not of the registrar general or the registrar recording the birth,” the GRO said.
[ID: A fake Spotify Wrapped screenshot that’s all black with white all caps text reading, “Spotify Wrapped. This MF spent all year with his ear pressed up against a damn” Insert three overlapping clipart pictures of tradition conch shells, text continues, “Conch shell” follow by the statistic, “Hours listening to conch: 1,000,000.” End ID]
The gunman has escaped so far. One suspects that narrowing the suspect pool will be difficult, due to the large amount of people, myself included because of a not-a-bill I received today denying coverage to my hormone panel bloodwork, who had motive.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s attempt to impose martial law collapsed after 190 Members of Parliament barricaded themselves into the National Assembly chamber and voted to end martial law while the military tried to break in to stop them before they could vote. Many members had to climb a fence at the back of the building to break in to get a majority of the 300 member body in the room to vote.
Can you imagine trying to explain this to a 3rd century crisis Roman general?
Maximinus: “So the… ‘president’ had the army surrounding the legislature? So he gets to be emperor now, right?”
“Well, almost, but then the lawmakers got into the building and voted that the army had to go away.”
Maximinus: “So the army went in and killed them, right? The lawmakers didn’t have any swords.”
“Well, no. Because they voted the army couldn’t do that.”
Maximinus: “But couldn’t they just do it anyways?”
“Sort of? But then everyone would be really mad and it would get even worse for the president.”
I feel like Maximinus would actually get this perfectly? He might think that these are unusually law-abiding soldiers, who exhibit rather a lot of the old Republican virtue; but nonetheless “willing to prevent the Senate from getting a quorum, but not to defy the edict of that quorum” actually feels kind of Roman to me.
spotify wrapped you were hollow in the soul for about six months and nineteen days :( your top five sorrows are unknown. you felt nostalgic twice but it affected most of your year afterwards
Shit man, this wizard war is fucked. I just saw a guy clap his hands together and say “the ten hells” or some similar shit, and every one around him turned inside out, had their tibia explode and then disappeared. The camera didn’t even go onto him, that’s how common shit like this is. My ass is casting frostbite and level 2 poison. I think I just heard “power word:scrunch” two groups over. I gotta get the fuck outta here.
Verily, man, this wizard peace is splendid. I just saw a guy clap his hands together and say “spirits o’ field and vineyard” or something along those lines, and every one around him was showered in fresh-baked pastries and loaves, had their cups fill with aged wine, and then were soothed by a warm summer breeze. The minstrels didn’t even sing his praises, that’s what a joyous time this is. And here I’ve just been casting calming dew and level 2 aura of cheer. I think I just heard “power word: dessert” two groups over. I gotta get over there.
a little fun fact: this is based on a visceral nightmare I had last night where Narinder was extremely realistic and was trying to kill me repeatedly. I finally dream of my pookie chasing me and all I got was a vivid horror experience.
being inside a slime or some kind of ooze is actually really enriching for adventurers and lets them explore new avenues of self expression so if you want to make an adventurer really happy you can throw them into one of us
being inside a slime or some kind of ooze is actually really enriching for adventurers and lets them explore new avenues of self expression so if you want to make an adventurer really happy you can throw them into one of us
im excited to do some reporting based on the data coming out of this leak, i already have a few interesting angles i will be taking a look at this from
disclaimer: please read the article, i had no involvement in this hack (though i knew about it early as i helped some journalists in the background) i am posting this here to spread the news. this disclaimer is unfortunately necessary because people on here always assume ive done every hack i talk about.
the new American Gothic. // artist unknown, feel free to tag and tell me who painted this.
This is by Mexican American artist Crieselda Vasquez. Her words on this painting is as follows.
“The two most important people in my life, my parents, are also the two who motivated me to develop such a strong concept. When my parents pose for these paintings, their faces are reduced to extremely raw and somehow vulnerable expressions. Sadly, they strive to be invisible every day. They don’t have to pretend to illustrate the invisible. They have dealt with constant rejection, suspicion and fear so long, that it seems now that it comes naturally to them. I strive to capture how their expressions deliver that sense of tiredness, resignation, and quiet acceptance. It seems relevant to show that underneath all the politicization and undeserved labeling this community receives, these are regular people just like all of us. In the long tradition of immigrants that come to the United States, they have made homes here and they are just trying to live a simple life with a bit of security and hopefulness for their children.“
U can watch Star Wars so many times and it doesn’t prepare u for how dumb Star Wars is. For one thing I think we gloss over how kenobi (who has definitely been at the club. Please.) describes the mos eisley cantina as the worst most villainous place ever and then u get inside and it’s a pack of muppets vaping
Sci-fi alien race that has that “No Xorbanian has ever killed another” thing going on, and then someone looks into it and discovers that, actually, they kill each other all the time, they just have an extremely nuanced and flexible definition of who a “Xorbanian” is, and they will revoke someone’s Xorbanian status when they feel like doing violence upon them.
And they don’t feel bad about it, because they honestly believe that once someone’s been excommunicated from Xorbanian status, they’re owed no moral considerations whatsoever.
I cannot stress enough the extent to which my brain is a machine for generating Star Trek plots.
And they’re really snobby about it, too; they’re like “Unlike humans, we Xorbanians do not kill our own.” And then they go to their homeworld and it’s just the most morally depraved planet in the universe
if you’re an active follower of mine, i do recognize your username and/or icon. i smile when i see it in my activity. i get excited when you add funny tags to things. i get really happy when you reblog my op posts. so thank you, i appreciate you massively.
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