Court ruling allows Idaho to ban trans people from changing birth certificates

BOISE (Idaho Statesman) – A court order will allow Idaho to enforce a state law that bans people from changing the listed sex on their birth certificate, which critics of the law have said singles out transgender people who want to change their legal documents to align with their gender identity.

The law has been on hold since 2018, when U.S. District Court Judge Candy Dale for the District of Idaho issued an injunction blocking the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare from enacting policy that automatically rejected any changes to listed sex unless the recorded sex was made in error at birth.

“For years, Idaho was blocked from enforcing common-sense policy and law requiring birth certificates to reflect biological sex recorded at birth,” said Attorney General Raúl Labrador in a news release. “Birth certificates aren’t symbolic documents that are subject to how an individual may feel, they’re legal records used in medicine, public health research, and identification.”

Dale’s ruling came when two transgender women sued department leaders and claimed the policy violated the U.S. Constitution.

Labrador filed a motion in October to dissolve the injunction on the grounds that U.S. Supreme Court rulings rendered it invalid.

The AG’s office argued that both plaintiffs in the case were “afforded complete relief.” The motion said one plaintiff was able to change her birth certificate, and the office was unable to find an Idaho birth certificate for the other. Because both plaintiffs’ complaints were resolved, the motion said, the law can’t be blocked as a general rule.

The Idaho Attorney General’s Office also pointed to a U.S. Supreme Court case decided in June that ruled a Tennessee law banning hormone and puberty-blocking medication doesn’t discriminate against transgender youth based on their sex or age. Labrador’s office said in its argument that Idaho’s law does not target transgender people specifically.

The case became more complicated when, in 2020, the Idaho Legislature passed a bill that emphasized “biology-based material facts” on birth certificates and made it possible to change birth certificate details only through a court challenge in instances of “fraud, duress, or material mistake of fact.”

With the 2018 injunction now dissolved, that law will go into effect for the first time.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the case, but Lambda Legal, a group that represents individuals in court cases over LGBTQ+ issues, has called Idaho’s policy “out of step with the rest of America,” according to prior Idaho Statesman reporting.

Eight states ban amending the listed sex on birth certificates, according to the Movement Advancement Project, a nonprofit think tank that focuses on election and equality issues.