New Transgender Birth
Certificates FAQ
I am permanently living in my acquired
gender and have official documents showing my new name and gender. Can I get
a new birth certificate?
Not yet. If your birth has been registered
in the UK a new birth certificate will be available once the Gender
Recognition Bill becomes law.
Once you are living permanently in your
acquired gender, you may obtain some official documents (including
passports, National Insurance cards and driving licences) in your new name
and gender. The organisations that issue these documents have their own
guidelines about when new documents are issued, so as to ensure that they
are properly able to serve the purpose for which they are provided. Gender
Recognition legislation will not affect this.
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How can I get a new birth certificate?
Following a successful application to the
Gender Recognition Panel for legal recognition in your acquired gender, the
Panel will issue you with a certificate of gender recognition. When the
Panel has issued the Gender Recognition Certificate, the Registrar General
will create a new record in relation to you in the Gender Recognition
Register, if the Registrar General has a record of the your birth. A birth
certificate in your new name and gender recorded on the gender recognition
certificate may be issued from the new record.
Information on how to apply for a new birth
certificate will be contained in an information pack issued by the Gender
Recognition Panel and the Registrar General. Birth certificates from the
Gender Recognition Register will be available, on payment of the prescribed
fee, on the same basis as applications for any birth certificate.
For more information on the Gender
Recognition Panel and applications, please see the FAQs
on the Gender Recognition Bill.
More information from the General
Register Office (GRO) is available on their website, including
information on how to obtain a birth certificate. The GRO has responsibility
for England and Wales.
For information on births, deaths and
marriages in Scotland, please visit the website of the General
Register Office for Scotland.
For information on births, deaths and
marriages in Northern Ireland, please visit the website of the General
Register Office for Northern Ireland.
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Why not just change the original birth
record?
The original birth record is an accurate
record of the facts at the time of birth.
As with other birth records where there is
a change of status, for example adoption or legitimation of a child on the
parents' marriage, the first record remains and a new one is created to
supersede the original.
The Government has said all along that it
does not intend history to be re-written. Original birth records will remain
in existence, unamended, and certified copies will continue to be made
available when needed, as currently happens.
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What will my new birth certificate look
like?
Your new birth certificate will not be
distinguishable from other birth certificates. There will be nothing on the
birth certificate to indicate it was compiled from information on the Gender
Recognition Register.
For births registered in England and Wales
there are different formats of birth certificate available depending on when
the birth was registered. For example, births registered before 1969
recorded no surname for the child and the sex was recorded as boy or girl. A
certificate for a birth registered after 1969 shows the child's full name
and surname and the sex is recorded as male or female.
If you were born before 1969, you will be
able to choose which format of certificate (i.e. a pre 1969 landscape style
or a post 1969 portrait format) you would like for your new certificate. If
you opt for a pre 1969 format you will not be able to record a new surname.
If you opt for a post 1969 format certificate and you were born before 1969
you will be asked to supply additional registration details as more details
are recorded now than were recorded prior to 1969, for example the places of
birth of the parents.
Certificates in a variety of formats are
currently available from registers relating to Consular and Forces
registrations, adopted and abandoned children and children born to surrogate
mothers. If your birth certificate is already in one of these formats, your
new certificate will reflect that style of certificate ie if you are adopted
your new certificate will show the information from your adoption
certificate, but your new name and gender will be recorded in place of the
name and gender originally shown.
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Won't people notice if my new birth
certificate is in the most recent format but I was born before 1969?
No. All other re-registrations and late
registrations of births (approximately 15,000 a year) are made in the post
1969 format regardless of the date of birth so Government agencies and other
organisations are used to seeing a mixture of dates and styles of birth
certificate.
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What is the difference between a short
birth certificate and full birth certificate?
A full birth certificate is a copy of all
the details contained in the register and, depending on the date of
registration shows the following:
- Name, date and place of birth
- Sex
- Father's name and occupation
- Mother's name and maiden surname
- Both parents' places of birth (birth
registered after 1969)
- Mother's usual address(birth registered
after 1969)
- Mother's occupation (birth registered
after 1995)
Short certificates are extracts of the
information contained in the register. A short birth certificate shows only
the name, sex, date and district of birth. No parents' details are shown.
Full certificates from adoption, consular
and armed forces records contain slightly different information
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The Bill mentions a Gender Recognition
Register. Why will there be a register? No other minority groups have
records held on a centralised national database?
The purpose of the Gender Recognition
Register is simply to create a new record from which the Registrar General
may produce a birth certificate. It is not intended as a record of all known
transsexual people, nor will it be used as such.
The register will not record current
address details nor any other information which could be used to locate a
transsexual person. The register will be held in the same way as the other
central registers maintained by the Registrar General, such as those for
adopted children and those for whom the courts have issued a parental order,
and will not be open for public scrutiny.
Note: Following
consultation with the trans community, the register has been renamed the
Gender Recognition Register.
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What information will be recorded in the
Gender Recognition Register?
The Registrar General will maintain a
central record which will contain all the details about date and place of
birth and parentage that are included in the transsexual person's original
birth record, together with the new name(s), surname and gender of the
transsexual person as notified by the Gender Recognition Panel.
In the case of an adopted person the new
record will show their adoptive parents rather than their birth parents
unless the adoption order has been quashed. Under adoption law the adopted
person is treated as the legitimate child of the adopters.
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What will happen to my original birth
record?
Once you have made a successful application
for legal recognition and an entry has been made in the Gender Recognition
Register your original birth record will be noted to show that the birth has
been re-registered by the Registrar General. The reason for this is to
ensure that it is clear that the original record has been superceded and
that certificates are issued from it only where they are explicitly
requested and the applicant knows the original birth details. Any birth
certificate issued from the superceded record will not show the marking. A
birth certificate from the new record will not disclose the fact that it is
compiled from the Gender Recognition Register and the system for connecting
the two registers will not be open to public inspection or search.
The Registrar General will maintain a link
between the original birth record and the entry in the Gender Recognition
Register. Neither the Gender Recognition Register nor the link between the
original birth record and the new record will be open to public inspection
or search.
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How will the link between the original
birth registration and the new birth record be maintained?
The existing birth record will remain in
the original bound birth register even though it is superseded by the new
record as is the case for all re-registered births. The Registrar General
will maintain a confidential record of the link between the original birth
registration and the new record. He will be able to provide linking
information to the originally registered name and sex of a transsexual
person only in the limited circumstances set out in the Bill. The Registrar
General already maintains a similar confidential link between birth records
and adoption records.
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Will there be an index of entries in the
Gender Recognition Register?
There will not be a separate index of
entries made in the Gender Recognition Register. Instead, references to
entries in that register will be included in the national birth indexes in
the year in which the new registration is made. This means that there will
be two entries in the indexes relating to the one person, one in the year
the birth was originally registered and on in the year of registration in
the new name. This is what currently happens in cases of re-registration on
legitimation of the child following parents' marriage. The indexes contain
between 600,000 and 700,000 references to birth records each year.
Records relating to adopted transsexual
people will be indexed in the Adopted Children Register index and entries
relating to transsexual people in overseas records will be indexed in the
current Overseas index.
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Why not remove the reference to the
original birth record from the index?
Indexes to birth records are provided and
made publicly available under statute. They are kept in large bound paper
volumes in the Family Record Centre in London and in local register offices,
as well as on microfiche in libraries etc across the country. It would be
impossible to remove the reference to the original birth registration in all
copies of the indexes. Any attempt to delete the entries would only serve to
highlight them. No other references to records which have been re-registered
are removed.
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Will overseas born transsexual people be
able to obtain a new birth certificate in the UK?
While transsexual people born outside the
United Kingdom will be able to apply for, and be granted legal recognition
in their acquired gender and therefore issued with a gender recognition
certificate, they will not be entitled to a United Kingdom birth
certificate.
The Registrar General can only issue a
replacement birth certificate to a transsexual person where the record of
his/her birth is held by the Registrar General. This includes all people
born in the UK, or born to a UK citizen abroad but registered by a Forces
registering officer, or with the British Consul or High Commission or born
on board a ship, or aeroplane or hovercraft and the birth has been
registered under the Merchant Shipping or Civil Aviation provisions.
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Citation: Dept for Constitutional
Affairs
