My wife was the one who told me that the birth certificate for Baby Girl Boylan had finally arrived in the mail in late summer. It had been a long time coming — 66 years, in fact — because Baby Girl Boylan, of course, was me.
When I transitioned nearly 25 years ago, changing my birth certificate didn't seem necessary: I'd been able to have all my other vital records altered, from my driver's license to my Social Security card, without that step.
In addition to Texas, in Tennessee, Montana, North Dakota, Florida, Oklahoma and Kansas, birth certificates can't be changed at all, although some of these prohibitions are still working their way through the courts, and Oklahoma's was put into place by executive order.
That's why I decided, at last, to ask the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to change the record of my birth a quarter century after my transition. My task was made no easier by having lost my original birth certificate. Sixteen years ago, my mother gave me everything from my elementary school report cards to the letters I'd written to her from summer camp in 1968. I put those documents in a leather messenger bag before going on a walk. When I reached my destination, I found that the zipper on the bag had broken, and all those documents had fallen out and blown away in the wind.
Source: See here
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