California has a specific procedure one must follow to have a birth certificate reissued (see below) after getting a court order changing your gender. The original certificate is supposed to be "locked up" and no longer available for viewing by the public without a court order.
In December 2008, I followed all of the steps to the letter, including requesting an original form from their office on their special low acid, archival quality paper.
I then began patiently waiting the projected SEVEN months for my new birth certificate to arrive in the mail.
Well, yesterday's mail had a full letter size envelope from the Office of Vital Records.
Wanting to savor the moment, I waited until I got into the house and carefully slit open the envelope. Contained within were the two copies of my newly issued birth certificate that I requested! I then checked and yes, my name and gender were now correctly entered!
And I received them in just four months, not the seven originally suggested.
That's the good news....
The bad news is that when they transferred the information from my old birth certificate to create the new one, the typist read the wrong fields! They entered the name of the City and County of my birthplace in the fields that were supposed to contain my father's first and last name! His name appears NOWHERE on my new birth certificate. (but the city and county are on the document twice)
So I composed a simple letter pointing out the error, enclosed the cover sheet they sent, the two birth certificates and a color photocopy of my original birth certificate for reference and dropped them in the mail today. So now we will see how long it takes this time to get the corrected documents.
So heads up! If by any chance you have been fortunate enough to have any of your government records updated, go back and check ALL of the fields, not just the ones you asked to have changed!
ps. I found it interesting to note that several fields were NOT even present on the new certificates. The old one had fields for doctors name and signature, race of each parent and address of the mother.
http://www.cdph.ca.gov/certlic/birthdeathmar/Documents/Gender%20Reassigment%20PAMPHLET%20(10-08)%20MERGED%205.pdf
