Kansas Plans To Ban Trans People From Updating Their Birth Certificates

"It really stands against where most of the country is."
From: NewNowNext

Kansas lawmakers are looking to toughen state regulations on birth certificate modification in an effort to prevent trans individuals from updating their certificates to reflect their actual gender identities.

Officials from the state’s health department want to completely do away with an existing regulation, which allows individuals to amend their birth certificates. The agency has been pursuing changes for the last several months and plans to begin implementing them within the next six weeks.

The new rules would allow someone to change the gender listed on their birth certificate only if they could prove that it had been misrecorded at birth.

Understandably, trans advocacy groups are outraged at the proposal as it directly bars trans folks from legally assuming their rightful identities.

“It really stands against where most of the country is on updating identity documents to accurately reflect who people are,” said Arli Christian, the state’s policy counsel for the National Center for Transgender Equality.

Republican Kansas state Sen. Mary Pilcher-Cook disagrees, however, stating that a birth certificate is “a record for future generations” and shouldn’t be changed. She argues that the document should reflect the “science” behind one’s “gender” not “political purposes.”

“Men and women are biologically different,” she concluded. “I don’t think we should become detached from reality.”

This past February, Stephanie Mott, a trans woman from Topeka, filed a lawsuit against the health department for not allowing her to change her gender on her birth certificate.

Pedro Irigonegaray, Mott’s lawyer, said the state’s latest proposal is not rooted in science or fact but only in the state government’s “bigotry,” further stating that “if this is passed, there will be litigation challenging its constitutionality.”

Mott fears the ruling will send more trans people into hiding and lead to an increase in suicide among trans youth who will feel that their home state is rejecting who they are, saying that “these regulations will be written in their blood.”

The Kansas state government, under the guidance of ultra-conservative Gov. Sam Brownback, has actively fought against marriage equality since its passing last summer and most recently overturned a pre-existing ban on anti-LGBT discrimination in the workplace.