The Click Times: BILLINGS, Mont. — Montana health authorities on Friday adopted permanent a policy that prevents transgender individuals from amending their birth certificates, even if they get gender-confirmation surgery.
In other words, the state of Montana can decide what gender is based on what they deem as “legitimate.”
This is a huge loss for transgender people in Montana who have been fighting for this change for years.
This is due to a new federal regulation that prohibits changing the gender marker on birth certificates.
This law has been blocked by a judge who ruled it was unconstitutional, but the state has appealed the decision. The issue is now in the hands of the Montana Supreme Court, which will be deciding whether or not it will uphold this law.
The Montana Supreme Court ruled that transgender people in Montana are permanently blocked from changing their birth certificates. The court ruled that the law does not violate any constitutional rights and that the state has a right to define gender as it sees fit.
The ruling on Friday, according to ACLU attorney Akilah Lane, is “more evidence of the state’s non-compliance” with Moses’ April injunction. The case will be heard by the court at a hearing on Thursday in Billings.
Before the new law, transgender persons in Montana merely had to submit an affidavit to the state health department in order to amend their birth certificate.
According to the new law, a person’s sex can only be altered on their birth certificate if it was incorrectly entered due to “a scrivener’s error” or if it was misidentified when the person was born.
Democratic state legislators have called the administration’s attempt to exploit the health department regulation to get around Moses’ ruling a “blatant misuse of power” and charged that it is undermining the judiciary.
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