US Magistrate Judge Candy Dale ruled on Monday that the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare violated the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution with its rule barring transgender people from changing the sex listed on their birth certificate. Furthermore she ruled that the rule served no rational government purpose and put transgender people at risk by forcing them to disclose their status when they present identification documents.
The department had been automatically rejecting requests for change of sex for transgender people.
A rule providing an avenue to obtain a birth certificate with a listed sex that aligns with an individual’s gender identity promotes the health, well-being, and safety of transgender people without impacting the rights of others.
--Judge Dale
Dale gave Idaho until April 6 to begin considering applications to change the sex listed on birth certificates under new, constitutionally sound rules. The ruling also says reissued birth certificates can’t include a record of the gender having been changed.
Idaho was one of four states prohibiting such a change...the others being Kansas, Tennessee and Ohio.
I am thrilled and proud that my own state will be updating their policies, even though it required a court order to do so.
--F. V., litigant
The two litigants were represented by Lambda Legal.
In the court ruling, Dale noted the difference between biological sex and gender: The scientific consensus is that biological sex is determined by several mostly physical factors including external genitalia, which hormones are prevalent and brain structure, while gender identity is the intrinsic sense of being male, female or another gender.
Dale also wrote the medical understanding of biological sex and gender has advanced significantly in the past several decades, and there is now medical consensus that gender identity plays a role in an individual’s determination of their own sex.
There is no conceivable, rational government interest in “a prohibition against changing the sex designation on the birth certificate of a transgender individual who has undergone clinically appropriate treatment to permanently change his or her sex.
--State's attorneys
The judge didn’t detail what the new rule should look like, but said that any new rule must not subject one class of people to any more onerous burdens than the rest of the population.
It is not guaranteed that all requested changes will be made as applications need to be reviewed and approved.
--Luis Sanchez, The Hill