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Hey -- this is out of our hands! Except when it isn't.
The other day, your humble narrator stopped off at the Department of Public Health to retrieve his own birth certificate. What promised to be a lengthy, Kafkaesqe experience was instead a snap: You pay your $14, they hand you a piece of paper, and you're done -- surprise!
Reading the certificate, I came across another surprise. While my father's job and employer were both listed, there was no space to fill in such information for my mother. As far as the form was concerned, giving birth was job enough. Granted, it was 1976 -- but that kind of reactionary behavior hardly seems symptomatic of San Francisco.
It's not, agrees Karen MacKenzie -- but there's not much her predecessors could do about it. The chief deputy registrar for the city and county notes that birth certificates are state forms -- and cities have no input into the format. Amazingly, professions for mothers and fathers were both listed as late as 1974 -- but by '76, inexplicably, the mother's profession was dropped.
By 1977, professions were no longer listed at all, and by '78, Social Security Numbers were dropped as well. And yet, when it comes to altering state forms to do away with sexism -- it's been done here.
Back in 2004, when Gavin Newsom made San Francisco the Las Vegas of gay weddings, recalls Kathy Hong, director of the county clerk's office, marriage licenses were simply re-done on a computer with input from the city attorney.
Forms that previously read "Bride" and "Groom" were made to read "Person A" and "Person B."
Meanwhile, in 2008, Hong recalls with a dramatic roll of her eyes, the forms changed three separate times -- "I can't tell you how stressful a year that was." First same-sex marriage was legal. Then it wasn't. And, to cap it off, a Roseville couple sucessfully sued the state, pressuring Sacramento into doing away with "Person A" and Person B" because they wanted to designate themselves "bride" and "groom."
The current forms offer either party the opportunity to be a "bride," "groom," or nothing.
For now.
