Tuesday, July 02, 2013

Georgia Cis Woman Asked To Prove Femininity To Correct Birth Certificate Error

Nakia Grimes sexFor those of you who are skeptical of the point I repeatedly make that Black trans issues are Black community issues as well, I submit that after her recent drama, 37 year old Nakia Grimes of Clayton County, GA would be the latest cis person saying amen to that.

Her birth certificate contained a typo on it listing her in the gender code as male that she'd never noticed, but an unidentified female employee in the Georgia Department of Public Records did.

As part of the restrictive Voter ID laws that many Republican controlled dictatorships states have enacted to make it harder to get a driver's license so you can then vote, they require you to produce a birth certificate in order to get it.   

When she showed up at the driver license place on the cusp of her 37th birthday the error was noted, and she now had to make a trip to the Georgia Department of Public Records to correct the birth certificate before she could get her license..  

Should be a simple process right?   Umm, no vanillacentric privileged conservafools, it isn't because the Voter ID Suppression laws you overwhelmingly support aren't specifically designed to frack with you.   

File:Flag-map of Georgia (U.S. state).svgThe still unidentified Georgia DPS clerk told Grimes she needed to have a PAP smear done, have a doctor write a notarized note verifying she was female before the error would be changed    

Never mind the fact that Grimes is the mother of a young son and of course she was highly pissed off after hearing that request.

She wasn't having it, much less undergoing an invasive medical procedure to verify for a bureaucrat what she knew in her mind, body and soul that she was a cis female. 

Grimes took her concerns to a local ATL television station and when FOX5 turned their unblinking TV camera eyes on this situation, the birth records for her son were pulled up by the GDPR and verified the fact Ms. Grimes was his mother.   Ms. Grimes' jacked up birth certificate was expeditiously corrected after that. 

No one cis or trans should have to go through that much drama, much less have to go to court to get a simple documentation change on your birth certificate so you can vote or get a drivers license.  It's one of the reasons why I was so pissed about the SCOTUS ruling invalidating Section 4 of the VRA and their BS reasoning for it.  

Trans people's fight to make it easier to change identity documents will also benefit cis people like Ms Grimes who have coding or other errors.

The moral of this story is once again it proves that we all exist in an interconnected web of mutuality.  What negativity you aim at a despised group has ripple effects that can blow back upon you cis people in unexpected ways. 

It also is more conclusive evidence that what ails Black trans America also ails Black America as well and vice versa.

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