It was probably stressful enough knowing that she would have to go and stand on long lines to get her license renewed. But when Nakia Grimes arrived with her birth certificate and was told that she had to get a doctor's note to prove she's a woman, her day undoubtedly went from bad to worse.

Grimes, a 37-year-old mother from Clayton County, Ga. says that she never noticed that there was an "x" mistakenly marked in the male gender box on her birth certificate. "You only look at the name, the date, and the year," Grimes told Fox News in Atlanta. "I've never seen that."

A worker in Georgia's Vital Records Dept. told Grimes that her birth certificate identified her as male and she would have to take steps to prove she's a woman in order to continue in the license renewal process.

"When I went to retrieve my birth certificate, I let her know the sex status is wrong," Grimes explained. "I'm a woman, was born a woman."

But that wasn't enough. The worker then asked Grimes to go get a gynecological exam and bring back the results to prove that she's a woman. "She said I needed to go have a PAP exam, have a doctor write a note verifying you're a woman, and bring it back-- notarized," said Grimes.

Grimes did not go and get the exam. She took her concerns to her local news station, who then contacted Vital Records. State record officials looked up the birth certificate of Grimes' son in order to verify that she had in fact given birth. They made the adjustments to Grimes' birth certificate so that she would not have problems with it in the future.

The process for correcting a birth certificate is often grueling. In Georgia, one must petition a court to make a change. There's an online form for a "Motion to Correct Birth Certification" as well as a seemingly lengthy process to get results. But after Grimes' troubling ordeal, she was able to circumvent the process and get her birth certificate changed.

The department's director said that what happened to Grimes was not protocol and that she would be investigating the incident.