A Birth Certificate Shouldn't Be Your Destiny

Who decides who you will be? 

The other day I needed to find some documents, so I delved into the family file with all the legal stuff. There I found both my birth certificate and that of my wife Lilian.

Mine is a pretty standard official copy of a Texas birth certificate, detailing where I was born, when, sex, parents names, etc. 

My wife’s was a very different document. Long and narrow, with a coat of arms and a note that it is created according to the 1951 ordinance for registration of births and deaths. It shows she was born in Sarikei, Sarawak and gives the names of her parents (both born in China), as well as the registrar of births and deaths. The country in which she was born, Sarawak, appears in no official US government database. She was born in end times of the last "white raja" of Borneo, Viner Brooke. It wasn’t modern Malaysia. And it wasn’t a British colony, and strictly speaking it wasn’t quite a country, since Raja Brooke was sort of under the Sultan or Brunei. Sort of. Still, there it was, an official government document from a government that no longer exists. (And let me tell you, trying to talk to the Social Security Administration about a country that doesn’t exist is a pain.) 

Now I’ve been to my wife's hometown of Sarikei, but I don’t remember the house in which I was born because we moved when I was just over a year old. And suddenly here I had the address. Which I instantly recognized. It is just a block from where Lilian and I have lived for the last 14 years. How about that. After 50 years away, and 20 overseas, and parent’s long passed, I moved back to within a block of my birthplace, which I pass every day while out walking.

Destiny? No. A series of choices we made about the kind of house we could afford close to the lake and SMU. 

In another drawer there is another stack of documents. Our passports. With all those years abroad we both have many, most now punched or mutilated to indicate they are no longer valid, but had still valid visas we needed.  

The two most recent passports for Lilian and I are both blue, both US passports, and both have the same address just a block from my birth place. All her older passports are red, and came from Malaysia. From before she was a naturalized US citizen.

Destiny? No, choices that she was free to make about the country she would call her home. 

If there was anything clear at the founding of the United States, and its subsequent history, it is that your birth certificate is not your destiny. It can tell you who you were. It cannot tell you who you will become, where you will live, and what you will do with your life.

Deeply embedded in the vision of humanity at the core of our country is this simple idea: We as individuals, and as a nation, choose our destiny. It isn’t handed to us by the “old country” with its ancient religious bigotry and fawning subservience to fading political structures. A new nation is a chance for a new identity, new friends and acquaintances, new political parties, new professions. And always at the root is personal choice. No one can tell you what religion you have to follow, what job you have to do, who you have to vote for, which party you should join, where you have to live, who you can visit, and on and on. You can even choose your ethnicity if you don’t like the choices you are given on the form.

(I think about this sometimes, since my granddaughters have a Euro-American grandfather of mixed European heritage, An Austro-Hungarian Jewish grandfather with a little English mixed in, a Chinese grandmother, and a Ukrainian Jewish grandmother whose family may have come out of Iran. Their mother and father already stretch the ethnic label boundaries, and thus what are they? Here's an answer: humans.)

When I told some Austrians I'd worked with for years that I was moving back to the US one said, "Amerikaneren sind wurzzelos." Americans are rootless. She was right, and its the best thing about us. 

There is an interesting article in the Washington Post about a different kind of roots. It spurred some of these observations: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/06/27/feature/seeking-a-scientific-explanation-for-trans-identity-could-do-more-harm-than-good/

It ends by noting that the matter of sexual identity is determined by the individual as they discover who they are and want to be. It isn’t determined by science, and it isn’t determined by their birth certificate. Regardless of the influence of biology or genetics it is their choice. And it is a choice they fully have a right to make. And in our country, in the United States, it is a choice that we should all respect. Because our nation is founded on that fundamental idea that individuals decide who they are and whose they are. 

None of us should have to carry our birth certificate around, much less wear it like a ball and chain.

Except that’s whats some politicians want, Dan Patrick and Ken Paxton here in Texas in particular. They are demanding a law that people can only go to the bathroom that matches their birth certificate. And more than that, that all bathrooms be gendered as well! They are demanding that a birth certificate also be a destiny.

As others are demanding, in another way, of all those who want to come to the United States and make us their nation. "Give me your tired, your poor, your wretched masses yearning to breath free" has become "Stay out and stay home. Your birth certificate is your destiny, and you are destined to oppression, violence, poverty, and war."

Those of us who believe in the vision on which the United States was founded need to oppose these enemies of our values every step of the way, whether they are in public office or hidden behind the facades of PACs . They need to be voted out of office as quickly as possible so that we can return to being a state, and nation, in which words on a document filed at your birth never determine who you are, or what you dream about becoming.