A friend’s wife recently gave birth. He reports that the New York birth certificate asks for the sex of the mother, and the sex of the father.
I was taken aback. How could the State of New York be so behind the times? Don’t the bureaucrats in Albany know what the T in LGBT stands for? How could they presume the crazy essentialism that presumed a person is either male or female?
As everyone knows, well, at least everyone who isn’t motivated by irrational prejudices or in the thrall of religious fanaticism, the form should ask for the sex or sexes of the mother, and the sex or sexes of the father.
No, wait, there’s an incipient prejudice at work in that formulation, one that presumes monogamy, which as we know is a socially constructed idea that probably reflects the power interests of men, or perhaps women, or maybe just priests. . . . Anyway, you know what I mean. Consult your local cultural theorists for details.
Therefore, the form should ask for the sex or sexes of the mother or mothers, and the sex or sexes of the father or fathers.
Get with the program New York! Be the progressive state you claim to be!
January 10th, 2013 | 8:50 am
Right you are. There was a couple who divorced, and the wife won custody of the frozen embryos they had produced together. She later, unilaterally, decided to implant, and when the baby arrived sued both the ex-husband and the lab which performed the ivf for child support. And won!
January 10th, 2013 | 9:07 am
Well, Rusty, you know this is coming in every state which has same-sex marriage. See the case Gartner v. Newton, currently making its way through the Iowa courts.
January 10th, 2013 | 9:18 am
NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo yesterday called for strengthening abortion rights in the state. Pretty soon New York won’t need to issue any more birth certificates.
January 10th, 2013 | 10:48 am
He reports that the New York birth certificate asks for the sex of the mother, and the sex of the father.
I would like to see a copy of this with my own eyes, since I truly doubt that any form requests the sex of the father. In any case, forgetting about the existence of LGBT advocates, not everyone is born male or female. (See the entry for intersex in Wikipedia.)
Are genetic males with complete AIS male or female? I don’t think there is a perfect answer to the question, although they are legally females, and I believe the Church would allow a person who perceives herself to be (and is perceived to be) a woman, even though genetically male, to marry.
It is just a fact that gender is nowhere as near as simple as some make it out to be, and to perfectly reflect reality (which I don’t think is necessary), forms that require gender should have something like: male, female, other.
January 10th, 2013 | 10:50 am
[...] do babies come from? The state of New York seems unsure. R.R. Reno reports today at First [...]
January 10th, 2013 | 12:32 pm
Is it M or F, or is it fill-in-the-blank? If so, could you put in F, M, T(ransgender), I(ntersex), O(ther)?
To capture more data in the changing world, would this be the next step, without evening mentioning father/mother?
Sperm from ____
Egg from ______
Carried in the uterus of _____
Anticipated legal guardians __*__
*Fill in as many as allowed per state (I suspect most states will still have 2.)
January 10th, 2013 | 1:46 pm
For what it’s worth, this account of the New York State birth certificate is inconsistent with a 2010 instruction manual for completing a New York State birth certificate.
That said, I favor Jim’s sperm/egg/uterus/guardian suggestion. It seems functional without needlessly provoking any side in the Culture Wars.
January 10th, 2013 | 5:20 pm
They seem to be making some assumptions that we will allow a female to “father” a child by creating sperm from her stem cells to fertilize a mother’s egg. I think birth certificates should record who provided the gametes, and the father is the person who provided the male-imprinted gamete, and the mother is the person who provided the female-imprinted gamete. So if we allow women to provide male-imprinted gametes, then we should record that on the birth certificate, that the father was female, or the egg provider was male.
But we should not allow people to be created in such convoluted unnatural ways, specifically any way other than the union of a man and a woman, because it is unethical and too expensive and unnecessary and would lead to loss of natural reproductive rights and harm human dignity to be created as an whimsical experiment.
David Nickol brings up the fact that some people are intersexed and that legal sex doesn’t always match the person’s reproductive capacity. Some species such as clownfish are able to change from producing eggs to producing sperm, but not humans. No person has ever both fathered and mothered children, ever. With stem cells and organ transplants, it is theoretically possible for one person to both impregnate someone and become pregnant by someone else, to be both a mother and father. But there is no right to do both, there is only a right to do one or the other, specifically the one that is most likely to be successful.
The Egg and Sperm law I’ve been proposing would prohibit making children with stem cell derived female sperm or male eggs.
January 10th, 2013 | 7:40 pm
He reports that the New York birth certificate asks for the sex of the mother, and the sex of the father.
I believe the New York State government knows that the father of a child is male. I suspect, from some things I have seen, that the form in question had something like:
Mother/Parent 1
Father/Parent 2
The second field is to list either the father or the second parent. It is not meant to indicate that the father is Parent 2 and Parent 2 is the father.
In any case, even that is pretty much irrelevant, since the same post could have been written to mock New York State for any form that requests gender information and gives only male and female as choices.
How could they presume the crazy essentialism that presumed a person is either male or female?
I am not the world’s expert on transgender people, but I believe the vast majority would identify as either male or female. People who feel they are “females trapped in male bodies” (or vice versa) don’t at all scoff at the concept of gender. They just believe themselves to be female (or male) in spite of the fact that they have male (female) bodies.
The Vatican, by the way, has said that gender-reassignment surgery “could be morally acceptable in certain extreme cases if a medical probability exists that it will ‘cure’ the patient’s internal turmoil.” However, in the opinion of the Vatican, gender-reassignment surgery is a misnomer, since the Vatican believes gender cannot be changed.
January 10th, 2013 | 10:41 pm
David, “a woman trapped in a man’s body” does not have a right to actually reproduce as a woman, with a man, by providing an egg or female-imprinted gametes, or to gestate a fetus in a transplanted womb and give birth through an artificial uterus.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact