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Governments have been receptive in recent years to calls to make it easier for people to change the sex on their personal records. Several provinces, including B.C., Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario and Nova Scotia, no longer require a person to have undergone sex-reassignment surgery before they can request a change to the gender designation on their birth certificates.

Earlier this year, Citizenship and Immigration Canada announced that it, too, would no longer require proof of sex-reassignment surgery in order to change the sex designation on a citizenship certificate. It now will accept an amended birth certificate.

But advocates say the changes do not go far enough because governments are still certifying as true information recorded at birth which they know may be wrong in some cases.

The current regime falsely presumes there are two genders, that genders never change and that you can tell a child’s gender at birth, said Vancouver human rights lawyer barbara findlay, who is representing the complainants and spells her name in all lower case.

“That means that children are raised ‘as’ the birth-assigned gender, which is a crazy-making experience. Instead of living in a social reality that recognizes that gender develops, and does not exist at birth, those children have nothing to work with except that something feels profoundly wrong,” she said via email.

“Getting to the stage of being able to ‘change’ gender is an anguishing process, in which a child often experiences severe pushback from their own families.”