The error is considered irreversible and the newborn, who is actually a girl, will have to respond to the male gender until the end of her life: it is not possible to issue a birth certificate twice. Parents are “horrified”.
Grace Bingham e Ewan Murray registered their first daughter this week at the Sutton-in-Ashfield Civil Registry Office in the United Kingdom. But they only realized that the registrar had made a mistake when they had already delivered the document.
“We were horrified, but we thought that since we had seen the error just seconds after it happened, it would be easy to fix it“, the father explained to . After all, it wasn’t quite like that.
“Although the conservator apologized for the error — and the area director also apologized — it turns out that birth certificates cannot be changed“, said Murray, disgusted.
The General Register Office (GRO), which is responsible for administering all civil registrations in England and Wales, and the Home Office confirmed to The Guardian that Lilah’s birth certificate cannot be reissuedalthough a change can be made to the margin of the original document.
Even sothe error is irreversiblein practice, which means that the newborn Lilah will always have to respond as being male.
“People reading a birth certificate can easily miss a small note in the margin—which means Lilah can be considered male when you apply for school, for a passport, for a job – for everything you need a full birth certificate,” said the mother.
“Even if people notice the correction, they will assume our daughter is transgender — which isn’t a problem if that’s what she wants to be when she’s older, but that’s not the case now,” he added.
The GRO said, after the parents filed a complaint, that it was their fault and there was nothing they could do, since, by law, a complete certificate must be an exact duplicate of the registration to which it refers. “I feel so guilty. I’m always crying. I am completely devastated by this,” Bingham said.
But this situation is not happening for the first time. With the same conservative.
Sarah Powerwho registered her daughter at the same registry office — with this conservator — in October last year, had a similar experience.
“The conservator read all the data correctly — including the fact that our daughter is a woman — and then asked us to check the spelling of her name,” she said. “We checked the spelling but not the gender because the registrar had already told us correctly“, says Power.
It turns out that when they looked more closely, the child’s sex was… male. Power still managed to reverse the situation, issuing a new certificate. But since then, the law changed — now, if there is an error in the registration, the citizen stays with it until the end of his life.
