Nyla Foster, the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging Kansas’s gender marker policy, speaks at a press conference on June 24, 2019. – Photo: Lambda Legal.
Transgender residents of Kansas will now be able to change the gender marker on their birth certificates to reflect their gender identity.
That change comes under a consent judgment by state officials and transgender plaintiffs who sued the state over its previous policy blocking such changes.
Lambda Legal filed a lawsuit in October 2018 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas on behalf of four transgender plaintiffs — Nyla Foster, Luc Bensimon, Jessica Hicklin, and a client known as “C.K.” — and a transgender advocacy group, the Kansas Statewide Transgender Education Project.
As part of the consent judgment, the court orders the Secretary for the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, as well as other state government officials, to provide accurate birth certificates reflecting the correct gender identity of transgender individuals.
Under the agreement, the state agrees that its previous policy was unconstitutional and violated people’s rights under the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment.
“I’m glad to see the state of Kansas has agreed to recognize us for who we are,” Foster, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, said in a press conference Monday morning. “It should have not taken a lawsuit to reach that conclusion. This judgment makes me feel safer and like my state finally recognizes me and respects me as a woman. I am proud that transgender Kansans like me will no longer be forced into dangerous situations because their identity documents do not match who they are.”
According to the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, almost one-third of transgender individuals who showed an identity document with a name or gender marker that did not match their perceived gender were harassed, denied benefits or services, discriminated against, or assaulted.
Those wishing to amend the gender marker on their birth certificate may do so by submitting a sworn statement, accompanied by a passport or driver’s license with their correct gender, or a letter from a health care professional attesting to their correct gender identity.
Lambda Legal hailed the consent agreement as a “tremendous victory” for transgender people in the state.
“This court-issued judgment builds not only on our recent court victories striking down similar policies prohibiting transgender people born in Idaho and Puerto Rico from having accurate birth certificates, but also upon years of advocacy by transgender Kansans,” Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, a senior attorney with Lambda Legal, said in a statement. “With this judgment Kansas will now finally be in line with the rest of the country, where already 47 states, Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico have acknowledged the importance of individuals having access to essential identity documents that accurately reflect who they are.”
Activists hope to build on their success in Kansas by toppling similar prohibitions on amending gender markers on identity documents that currently remain in place in Ohio and Tennessee. Lawsuits have been filed in both states challenging such prohibitions as discriminatory and unconstitutional.
“As a transgender Black man living with a disability, I experience discrimination and embarrassment often, but a birth certificate inconsistent with who I am only made things harder,” Bensimon said in a statement. “It is a huge relief to finally have an accurate birth certificate that is a true reflection of who I am.”
Luke Ash, a Baptist pastor who worked at the East Baton Rouge Parish Library, says he was fired after refusing to use a trans co-worker's preferred pronouns.
Luke Ash, lead pastor of Stevendale Baptist Church in Baton Rouge, says he was fired from his job as a library technician at the East Baton Rouge Parish Library after refusing to use a co-worker's preferred pronouns. He was reportedly dismissed after referring to the colleague by female pronouns during a July 7 conversation with another library employee.
"That co-worker corrected me, said that the person she was training preferred to be called 'he,' and I refused to use those preferred pronouns," Ash told anti-LGBTQ activist and Family Research Council President Tony Perkins during an interview on the conservative Christian political show Washington Watch with Tony Perkins.
Special education teacher River Chunnui sued after being accused of "sexualizing children" and doxxed by school board members over their gender identity.
An Arizona school district has settled a discrimination lawsuit brought by a transgender, nonbinary teacher who alleged that two school board members led a smear campaign against them based on their gender identity.
The teacher, River Chunnui, alleged they were targeted and harassed because of their gender identity. Chunnui, who had worked as a special education teacher in the Peoria Unified School District since 2018, said the retaliation began after they sent an email to colleagues at Desert Harbor Elementary School on March 31, 2022.
The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear two cases challenging state laws that bar transgender student-athletes from competing on female-designated sports teams at public schools and universities. One of those cases, Little v. Hecox, involves Boise State student Lindsay Hecox, who sued after being denied a spot on the school’s women’s track and cross-country teams under Idaho’s transgender sports ban.
A federal judge blocked Idaho’s law in 2020, finding that it likely violated the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution and discriminated against Hecox and other transgender athletes based on sex and transgender status. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ruling in 2023 and again in an amended opinion last year. The state then appealed to the Supreme Court, asking it to decide whether the ban is constitutional.
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