Short answer. Sometimes. On its own text, Section 2 of RA 9048 barred any correction changing the sex of the petitioner without a court. But RA 10172 amended the law in 2012 to allow administrative correction of a clerical error in the sex or gender entry. A plain typing mistake can now be fixed without court; a genuine change of sex cannot.
What the law says
no correction must involve the change of nationality, age, status or sex of the petitioner
RA 9048, Section 2 — Definition Of Terms. Read the full provision →
What Section 2 originally said
Read alone, this section draws a hard line. It defines a clerical or typographical error as a harmless, obvious slip like a misspelled name or misspelled place of birth, correctable only by reference to other existing record or records. Then it adds a crucial limit: no correction must involve the change of nationality, age, status or sex of the petitioner. On that original text, the sex or gender entry was off-limits to the administrative route entirely, and any fix had to go through a court. That is why, for years, correcting the sex field meant a judicial petition.
RA 10172 widened the door in 2012
That original limit no longer states the full rule. In 2012, Republic Act No. 10172 amended RA 9048 to bring two more items within the administrative route: the day and month of birth, and a clerical error in the sex or gender entry. This is the current position. A mistake in the sex field that is genuinely clerical, the kind visible on the face of the record, can now be corrected by the local civil registrar without a court order. So the flat bar you may read in Section 2's original text has been narrowed, and you should read that text as subject to RA 10172.
A clerical slip, not a change of sex
The widening is real but narrow. RA 10172 covers a clerical error in the sex entry, the same harmless-and-innocuous kind of mistake Section 2 describes for names: a clerk wrote the wrong sex where every other record shows otherwise, an obvious slip provable from existing documents. It does not provide a route to change a person's sex as a matter of identity. If the correction sought is not a typing mistake but an actual change of the sex recorded, that falls outside what the registrar may do administratively, and the courts remain the forum. The dividing line is whether the entry was simply written wrong.
Who decides, and the risk of misfiling
The official who acts is the local civil registrar who keeps your record, or the consul general for a birth reported abroad. Because RA 10172 attaches extra safeguards to sex-and-birthdate corrections, the registrar examines the supporting records closely before allowing the change. The registrar, not you, decides whether your case is a clerical error within the amended law. If it is not, the application can be denied and the matter left to a court. Filing the wrong kind of request wastes time, so it helps to be clear from the start whether you are fixing an obvious typo or seeking something the administrative route was never meant to grant.