Jubie Matlou
The Department of Home Affairs has instructed a Cape Town woman to have her sex certified by a district surgeon after her complaint that the department arbitrarily changed her gender on her identity document.
The apparent mishap occurred when Georgia Kinghorn lodged her application for an identification document nine years ago.
She only realised the department had made a mistake when she went to the local licensing department to register her vehicle.
“An official in the licensing department told me that she couldn’t process my application to register a vehicle because the computer system indicates that I am a man, instead of a woman. The whole thing just sounded ridiculous to me,” she said.
While Kinghorn’s ID number indicates that her gender is male – the system encodes particulars of gender in numerical form only – when her surname is entered into the department’s computer system, it seems she doesn’t exist at all.
Home affairs’s fumble has affected Kinghorn financially. With a new job, she has applied for a cheque account and a credit card, but the bank cannot process her application until her “gender problem” is sorted out with the department.
When Kinghorn tendered her birth certificate before home affairs officials to prove that she is female, she says the official attending to her said “nothing short of an examination by the district surgeon” would resolve the problem.
From a social viewpoint, Kinghorn is immobilised because she can’t drive her newly bought vehicle without the necessary licence to be on the road. As a result, she has to rely on public transport and the courtesy of friends and family for lifts to work and social gatherings.
Earlier this week, Kinghorn submitted her long-time family doctor’s letter to the department in a bid to resolve the confusion without the embarrassment of visiting the district surgeon.
Kinghorn relocated with her mother from England to South Africa in the mid-1980s, and received the better part of her education from Johannesburg’s Sandringham High, only returning to England in the early 1990s for O-levels.