Why I Changed My Birth Certificate 25 Years After I Transitioned
Oct. 12, 2024, 7:00 a.m. ET
Credit...Aaron Hardin
By Jennifer Finney Boylan
Ms. Finney Boylan is the author of the forthcoming “Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us.”
My wife was the one who told me that the birth certificate for Baby Girl Boylan had finally arrived in the mail in late summer. It had been a long time coming — 66 years, in fact — because Baby Girl Boylan, of course, was me.
When I transitioned nearly 25 years ago, changing my birth certificate didn’t seem necessary: I’d been able to have all my other vital records altered, from my driver’s license to my Social Security card, without that step.
I’d also declined to get my birth certificate changed because it seemed like a rewriting of the historical record. To all of the onlookers on the day I arrived — my parents, the labor and delivery nurses at Bryn Mawr Hospital — the child they delivered appeared to be male. Everything else came later, as I gained consciousness, and clarity, about who I really was.
When I thought about it (if I thought about it), I wondered what a birth certificate is for. Is it a living document that can be amended in years to come, like the Constitution, as the person it belongs to gains agency and insight? Or is it a simple statement of long-past fact — like whether, on the day I was born, it was hot or cold?
But the threat of a second Trump presidency means that having my birth certificate reflect present reality has turned into a matter of grave importance. Quite frankly, whatever is on that document may in the not so distant future determine whether one can live one’s life in peace.
In the years since my transition, many states have formalized processes by which the gender on one’s birth certificate may be changed — while others have enacted laws to make such changes impossible.
In August the Texas Department of State Health Services imposed a policy that blocks transgender people from making the change, even if they have a court order allowing them to do so. It was yet another salvo in the fight against trans rights and lives, an ongoing effort to render us invisible and to make our lives as difficult as possible.
The differences in policy, state to state, are complex. According to the
Movement Advancement Project, a nonprofit policy and research think tank, seven states do not allow amending the gender marker on birth certificates. At least 12 states require proof of sex reassignment surgery to make a change. Fifteen states and Washington, D.C., allow the gender-neutral designation “X,” though one of those states, Utah, requires a court order to make changes. Two states have no official policy, and Indiana’s policy is unclear, which might mean that permission to grant the change of birth marker is made according to the whims of a presiding judge or other administrative official.
In addition to Texas, in Tennessee, Montana, North Dakota, Florida, Oklahoma and Kansas, birth certificates can’t be changed at all, although some of these prohibitions are still working their way through the courts, and Oklahoma’s was put into place by executive order.
In the early years after my transition, I found that some conservatives saw my story as an object lesson in courage. Now I find that more often than not, people like me are a punchline for conservative jokes, or an occasion to whip up their base (as Donald Trump did in September
when he said from the debate stage that Kamala Harris wants to “do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison”).
My early, relatively blithe response to my birth certificate status is not common among trans people I know. I’ve long since been convinced by the many trans folks whom I respect that a birth certificate carries a larger and more symbolic meaning, and to alter that document means that one’s past and present are in sync.
That’s why I decided, at last, to ask the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to change the record of my birth a quarter century after my transition. My task was made no easier by having lost my original birth certificate. Sixteen years ago, my mother gave me everything from my elementary school report cards to the letters I’d written to her from summer camp in 1968. I put those documents in a leather messenger bag before going on a walk. When I reached my destination, I found that the zipper on the bag had broken, and all those documents had fallen out and blown away in the wind.
There I was, a few years after my transition, without a single document to attest to my past. In this, as in so much else, I had to start from scratch.
In Pennsylvania, in order to have my gender marker changed, I had to submit a statement attesting to my treatment by my doctor. It was sworn to be true “under penalty of perjury.” But my surgeon’s statement, while it had been notarized and sworn by him, did not contain that phrase. The Pennsylvania Department of Health rejected my application on these grounds, and I was asked to have my physician make the amendment.
I’m sure he would have been happy to help, if he hadn’t died five years ago.
It took two months of back-and-forth conversations before my application was processed — with help from Rachel Levine, the assistant secretary of health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, who intervened on my behalf. (It’s worth noting that Dr. Levine was formerly Pennsylvania’s health secretary.)
Even those of us lucky enough to live in the right place, to have the right connections and to live our lives out in the open now fear a future in which everything we have fought for can be taken away.
What does it mean to change a birth certificate in one’s 60s? I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind about what the doctors and nurses thought they saw, back in 1958. But I do know that the change I made this summer might ensure my safety in all the years that lie ahead.
When the document from the Commonwealth finally came in the mail, I was in New York, and my wife was in our house in Maine. I asked her to open the letter for me.
“Congratulations, Jenny,” she said. “It’s a girl.”
