In a move some see as an end-run toward same-sex marriages, the New York City Board of Health, with the support of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, is considering a policy that would permit people born in the city to change the sex recorded on their birth certificates.

The idea, as described by advocates, is to separate sexual identification from anatomy. There would be no need to have a sex-change operation. All that would be needed would be an affidavit from a doctor or mental health professional making the case for the change.

Applicants would have to have changed their name and shown that they had lived in their adopted gender for at least two years. But there would be no medical requirements.

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"Surgery versus non-surgery can be arbitrary," explained Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the city's health commissioner, to the New York Times. "Somebody with a beard may have had breast-implant surgery. It’s the permanence of the transition that matters most."

The move, which appears likely to take place soon, is the result of a major push by the so-called "transgender" lobby – an outgrowth of the homosexual activist agenda.

Though the discussions about the policy change have been held mostly behind closed doors, some opposition to the move already has been recorded.

"They should not change the sex at birth, which is a factual record," Dr. Arthur Zitrin, a Midtown psychiatrist who was on the panel of transgender experts, said. "If they wanted to change the gender for all the compelling reasons that they’ve given, it should be done perhaps with an asterisk."

David Usher, a senior policy analyst for the True Equality Network and president of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children, sees the policy switch as opening the doors to same-sex marriage without new legislation.

"The New York elite is attempting to make same-sex marriage legal without making it legal," he says. "This illegal maneuver must be stopped dead in its tracks. If successful, feminists will roll this legal maneuver out everywhere possible to effectively make state constitutional amendments banning gay marriage useless."

There seems little question that a man, who changes his sex on paper through this method, could marry another man. It is also likely to make it more difficult for adoption agencies to find out the actual sex of a proposed parent. Whether a man who changes his sex in this manner would be eligible to fight in combat or not is a question no one could answer.

The Board of Health is scheduled to vote on the proposal next month, and officials say they expect it to be adopted.

Some advocates of the policy change don't think it goes far enough.

Michael Silverman, executive director of the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, said transgender people should not have to rely on affidavits from a health care system that tends to be biased against them.

All eight experts the Board of Health called in to address the birth certificate issue strongly recommended the change be made.

New York is at the forefront of adopting measures aimed at blurring the lines of sexual identification. Last month, for instance, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority agreed to let people define their own gender when deciding whether to use the men's or women's bathrooms.

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