Legalities of Gender, Part III

My application went through, and my legal details have been amended! The certificate lists my name, gender (female), date of birth, and country of birth (Malaysia). Where I might ordinarily provide a birth certificate to identify myself, I can produce this instead.

What does this mean? Well the short answer is, it means I'm legally female!

The longer answer is that it means I can finally have that pesky M on my bank account/insurance/passport changed to an F, and that I have the same legal rights as any woman, entitling me to do things like marry a man (but prohibiting me from marrying a woman, since gay marriage is still illegal in Australia, of course).

Something I haven't gotten my head around is that they've also canceled my change-of-name certificate. I'm not exactly sure what this means, but it seems to imply that, officially, my name has always been Amanda and I've always been female. This raises the question of what I'm going to do about some vestigial things which are still in my old name; I can foresee a lot of confusion if I try to request for a name change using the canceled certificate, and the new Recognised Details certificate doesn't contain any details to link me to my previous name. Hmmm.

The really surreal part is that to me, and to most of the people around me, who I am has become so obvious that the official stuff just seems odd and overstated. But that's our society for you. :)