< QUEER
- Find the M on your ID suffocating. Reflect for a while on how little calling yourself a man feels resonant with your predominantly agender experience, and the fluidity with which you navigate your lived identity from moment to moment. Resonate with they. Enbify.
- Look up the process to get to X. Living in one province, being born in another, and having a passport managed by the federal government means this is three tasks:
- Start with BC. Find out that, while they recently changed the requirements to eliminate the need for a doctor’s note, there’s still an application rigamarole. Later. Note to self that a new birth certificate is the easiest way to apply.
- Head to Ontario. Track down the Application for a Change of Sex Designation on a Birth Registration of an Adult after some mercifully straightforward searching. Later.
- Now, Canada itself. Read the page outlining X in passports, and find the writing confusing enough that you have to email the government to ask whether it is possible to change a gender on a passport before renewal (and wait a week to find you can’t). Note, again, that an updated birth certificate is the easiest way to do so.
- Identify a path forward. Draw a way out of the labyrinth of paperwork and settle on getting an updated birth certificate as the best way to ready for X on both your provincial and federal IDs.
- Read how to update an Ontario birth certificate. Basically, this requires sending the Ontario government five documents:
- The AfaCoSDoaBRoaA’s first page. Note the temporary fee waiver until October 31, 2022, and then wonder why there’s a fee at all to have an affirming gender marker starting in November.
- A Statutory Declaration for a Change of Sex Designation on a Birth Registration of an Adult (SDfaCoSDoaBRoaA). Since this is a legal affidavit, it will require you to declare it in front of a professional like a notary public or a lawyer, which might mean a cost.
- A health practitioner’s letter confirming your gender identity. This includes verifying that they “are of the opinion that the change of sex designation…is appropriate,” which frankly takes the power to discern one’s own gender identity away from people.
- All previously issued birth certificates, birth certificates with parental information, and certified copies of the birth registration. Realize that the birth certificate you have is not the only document of your birth. Wonder if this is important for some reason.
- A Request for Birth Certificate application with payment for any requested birth certificates. Wait, what about that fee waiver—so there is, in fact, at least one fee necessary, since presumably nobody would apply to change their birth certificate and not want a copy of said changed certificate? So there will be two fees to do this starting in November? Sounds about right.
- Sigh.
- Start small. Gather the documents in Notion, and since you’re a printerless millennial, email them to a print shop to get them printed. Pay $6 for the single-page printing, black and white, recycled paper if you have it.
- Work your way through the documents.
- The AfaCoSDoaBRoaA’s first page. Basic information; name, address, contact. Takes no time. Great. Easy start. Fee waiver. How hard can the rest be?
- The SDfaCoSDoaBRoaA. Okay, some more basic information, this time with your place of birth and parents’ names. Declare that you want to change from M to X, and acknowledge that by doing so you may create a situation where your ID is not accepted, because the government doesn’t want to protect you in Ontario and can’t do so in, say, other countries where there’s a respect shortage. Wonder why you are required to certify that you are not doing this “for an improper purpose,” such as, presumably, a transphobic falsehood like predating on children in public bathrooms. Hold off on signing and finding a witness until you get the rest together.
- A health practitioner’s letter. You’re privileged enough to have a family doctor, a millennial like you, who is understanding and supportive of you and your identity. At one appointment, you mention your desire to change your gender identifier and that it will take a letter, and he asks you to find the requirements and bring them back in. So you eventually do, and he has you read the language Ontario asks for to him, writes it live, prints it off, and tells you to have a front desk staffer stamp it. They ask you whether there’s a fee for the note. Since your doctor didn’t mention one, you say no; they stamp it.
- All previously issued birth certificates, birth certificates with parental information, and certified copies of the birth registration. Since you only know of the birth certificate you’ve seen, you wait until the holidays, fly to Ontario to see your family, and put the birth certificate with your things. Simple enough.
- A Request for Birth Certificate application. Seven pages. Gulp. First page, basic information, name and contact again. Indicate what you want—a birth certificate, at the “replacement” fee of $35 ($10 more than a first birth certificate). Exhale. Second page, basic information again, then… wait. Detailed information about your birth, with the instruction to “complete all fields below.” Questions like birth weight, attendant type and name, your parents’ address in that house they lived in when Dad was in the military where you got asthma from the wall mold which has since been demolished. Questions without clear answers on your birth certificate.
- Ask your parents if they have any more information on your birth details. They don’t. They also don’t have any other documentation than your birth certificate, and they have no idea there are other documents than a birth certificate recording your birth.
- Hunt for which document contains that information. After a few web searches, realize this detail is included in a certified copy of birth registration, that third document listed on the AfaCoSDoaBRoaA. Sigh.
- Figure out what it takes to get a certified copy of your birth registration. There’s an online ordering process, and a higher price for an expedited document search and mail-out. Not wanting to delay this any longer, you fill out all the detail you have and spring for it: $65. (If you could be more patient, it would still cost $35.)
- Wait about a week for the birth registration to come. When it does, delight in Dad’s familiar handwriting, and the inane facts you need (turns out you weighed 3,975 g at birth; what are Drs Davies, Johnson, and Langlotz up to 29 years later?). Fill out the corresponding fields. Second page down. Five more to go:
- Third page. Apparently you need someone from a prescribed list of ostensibly more trustworthy professions to vouch that you are who you are. Luckily, one of Dad’s cousins is a nurse in Victoria, so she can be your voucher. You text her to ask, and she is an enthusiastic yes. You ask her for her work address, since they demand it.
- Fourth page. Oh, extra space for previous pages. Instructions on the fifth, the sixth. The seventh page is just a place to write down all your credit card information. You remember the online form to get your birth registration copy and briefly wonder why you’re writing down your credit card number on a piece of paper in 2022, and what it is about changing your gender that requires paper documents to be legitimate.
- Paperclip everything together. Double-check it all. Worry about the fact that you used correction tape on two fields where you transposed your first and last name as you listed your name next to Dad’s cousin’s, when the first page says not to use correction tape or fluid. Hope this is no big deal.
- Track down a notary public for the SDfaCoSDoaBRoaA. You remember a sign you walk past sometimes in your neighbourhood. Her name is Portia, and you call to get an appointment. When you get there, she has the back office in a retail space with several different small businesses operating out of it and nobody wearing any masks. You are uncomfortable and grateful for your N95, since you and your husband aren’t doing any indoor maskless contexts with Omicron circulating, but it’s more important to get this done than find another notary. Portia tells you she has a $60 fee, including taxes, and you realize the account you have a debit card for doesn’t have enough. You leave, e-transfer yourself the money, and walk to a Vancity ATM so you don’t have to pay a withdrawal fee. With $60 in stiff plastic twenties, you return, interrupting Portia in the middle of tea and arrowroot cookies. She offers them to you repeatedly, noting she had just bought them at Shoppers, and is not satisfied until you have stuffed an entire sleeve of cookies into your backpack since you are refusing to take your mask off. You drop the $60 on her desk, and she reviews and fills out her part of the page, watches you sign it too, and embosses the paper with a neat little desktop press that makes everything it squeezes official.
- Go to the post office. Given all you’ve gone through, buy an Xpresspost envelope with tracking so the stack of gender affirming magic gets to Thunder Bay safely. $25.
- Reflect as you wait for your new birth certificate. Ask yourself why it takes so much time, effort, and money ($191, so far) to affirm your own identity. Ask yourself how people who are less privileged and resourced and comfortable navigating paperwork and government systems are able to get the small affirmation of ID that matches your experience and gender identity. Think about the other steps you’d have to take if you didn’t have a family doctor, or if you had one who didn’t support you, since apparently that could be at their discretion. Ask yourself why this process has multiple layers of fees and no digital option. Wonder whether there are legal clinics that do this for people, and how they handle the upstream document requirements which aren’t immediately clear (such as the need for your birth registration). Dread going through the process again twice, in BC and federally, and the fact that your passport will still have an M in it until you can renew it in 2026. Wonder when your certificate will arrive.
| Step | Reason | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| 6 | Document printing | $6 |
| 7 | Application fee | $0 (’til Nov 2022) |
| 7 | Doctor’s note fee | $0 (luckily) |
| 7 | New birth certificate | $35 |
| 10 | Birth registration | $65 |
| 13 | Notary public | $60 |
| 14 | Document mailing | $25 |
| TOTAL (so far) | $191 |