The Home Office has already confirmed that the child will not be entitled to a new birth certificate. Lilah’s parents fear that it will be thought that they wanted to change the sex of the newborn.
The birth certificate of a newborn baby will always have its sex recorded as male, due to an error in data registration. The boy’s parents were told that the neglect could not be corrected.
Last week, Grace Bingham and Ewan Murray, mother and father of newborn Lilah Murray, went to the Mansfield registration center, in the Nottinghamshire region, England, to register their first-born, according to The Guardian. Once the process was completed, the couple realized that there had been a mistake. The birth certificate said Lilah was male..
“We don’t even remember to tick the gender box, which is partly our responsibility,” Ewan Murray tells NottinghamshireLive. However, there was nothing to indicate that they should have this concern in mind: “They asked him several questions, but never the sex of the child because that information was given to him by the hospital note, which he received on the screen.”
Since they identified the error just seconds after submitting the document, the parents assumed it would be easy to reverse the error. They were wrong. “Although the technician who made the registration apologized for the mistake, as did her superior, we came to know that Birth certificates cannot be changed.“They told The Guardian.
HE General Registry OfficeThe institution responsible for civil registration in England confirmed that Lilah’s certificate cannot be reissued. However, a modification outside the original document which says: “The masculine gender became feminine.”
Grace Bingham is not satisfied with the solution. “People reading the birth certificate could easily miss the little note in the margin, which means Lilah could be mistaken for a boy when applying for school, a passport, work, anything that needs a certificate.”
In fact, for now, Lilah has been officially treated as a baby boy. “We had to register her with her doctor and child benefits when she was a child.. The system has already failed him and he only has five weeks left,” accuses his father, Ewan Murray.
“Even people who notice the correction They will assume our daughter is transgender.“. Even if you assume that you would have no problem with a decision in this regard by your own daughter when she was older, the information in the document may suggest otherwise. “It looks like she was born a boy and we decided to turn her into a girl at five weeks old,” the mother said.
The scenarios predicted by Grace Bingham do not end there. “Lilah may also not believe that she was born a girl; on the contrary, she may think that something strange on a biological level happened at the time of her birth.” But until Lilah can make these considerations, the case worries her parents even more: “I feel very guilty. I can’t stop crying. “I am completely devastated by this.”
The family challenged the situation before the General Registry, but, considering that the marriage was to blame, the institution reported that the certificate cannot be rectified. “Currently, the legislation does not provide for corrected documents to show only the correct information,” they argued. Therefore, the correction can only be made through the note in the margin of the document.
Lee Anderson, the MP representing Lilah’s parents’ constituency in the House of Commons, has already contacted the Ministry for Children with a view to making changes to the current law.
“Obviously, something is wrong with the system“Anderson accused. “Where is the common sense in all this? I can’t think of any other way in this country that cannot be changed,” said the deputy, who later received a response from the Minister for Children showing his willingness to discuss the matter.
Another case, reported by The Guardian, shows how situations similar to that of the Nottinghamshire family did not always have the same outcome. In October last year, Sarah Power registered her daughter at the same centre, coincidentally, using the same technique.
“The technician correctly dictated all the details to us; in fact, our daughter was a woman,” says Power. “It wasn’t until we left the registration center that we looked at the certificate and realized that our daughter had been registered as a boy,” she recalls.
Unlike Lilah’s parents, Sarah Power received a new corrected birth certificateafter the technician gave you a form from the General Registry Office. However, this option was no longer available this year, after the Home Office was advised not to correct documents in this way.
Source: Observadora
