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A B.C. parent who is fighting to have their child issued a birth certificate with no gender specified has received a gender-neutral health card for the child.

Kori Doty is a non-binary transgender parent — who prefers to be identified using the pronoun “they” instead of “he” or “she” — of nearly eight-month-old Searyl.

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When Doty registered Searyl’s birth with the Vital Statistics Agency, which tracks and issues certificates for births, deaths and marriages in B.C., they did not specify a gender, instead writing “u/k” or unknown for the baby’s sex.

The agency registered the birth but refused to issue a birth certificate because the Vital Statistics Act requires that a birth certificate specify a person’s sex. Doty responded by filing for a judicial review of the decision.

“I do not gender my child. It is up to Searyl to decide how they identify, when they are old enough to develop their own gender identity. I am not going to foreclose their choices based on an arbitrary assignment of gender at birth based on an inspection of their genitals,” Doty said in a news release.