In 2006, Kirsti Miller was faced with a choice: get a divorce, or keep the word "male" on her birth certificate, despite having transitioned gender.



Miller, a keen AFL player and taxi driver who lives in the outback Australian city of Broken Hill, married her childhood sweetheart in 1985.



Fourteen years later, in 1999, Miller came out as a transgender woman, and started on hormone replacement therapy. In 2006 she had gender reassignment surgery and started changing her legal name and sex on various documents.

But one fact loomed large among the changes: if Miller wanted to change the sex on her birth certificate – considered a crucial identity document in Australia – she and her then-wife would have to divorce.

In order to change the sex on a birth certificate in the state of New South Wales, a person must fulfill four criteria: be over 18, born in NSW, unmarried and have undergone gender affirmation surgery.



"Always at the end of the line, for me to gain my female birth certificate I would have had to divorce her," Miller told BuzzFeed News. "It made a legal terrible ending, we had no way out of that.

"That was written in law for us, when it should have been a decision between us two consenting adults."