Apropos of the scary shit that’s going on for trans people around the world right now, the concept of “birth certificate laundering” seems to be becoming a thing.

It goes like this: you transition and go through gender recognition somewhere hostile, like the UK. You get a new birth certificate (for now?) but you are still “on the list”, and they know if they look hard enough; the original record is still there.

But then you naturalise or register as a citizen of another country (Ireland, for those able to via the grandparent route, for example, naturalisation through residence and assimilation in my case), and when you naturalise you give them the post gender recognition birth certificate.

That breaks the link. Your country of new citizenship registers your birth and, at as far as they are concerned, you are “legally cis”.

And if they start hunting us via gender recognition records, we can hopefully hide.