Social Security No Longer Allows Changes to “Sex Identification”
The Social Security Administration has imposed a new restriction refusing to amend the sex field on a person's records.
The U.S. Social Security Administration has stopped allowing people to make changes to the gender marker, also known as “sex identification,” on their Social Security records.
As first reported by Metro Weekly alum Chris Geidner, writing for his Law Dork Substack, the Social Security Administration imposed the “emergency” change last Friday. It went into effect “immediately.”
The “emergency message,” issued internally, stated, “Effective immediately, we can no longer process changes to the sex field on the NUMIDENT,” a reference to the Numerical Identification System, which contains the information provided to obtain a Social Security number, including a person’s sex.
In the first days of the second Trump administration, the Social Security Administration took down a webpage outlining how to change one’s sex identification. However, there had been anecdotal reports of changes still being allowed.
The internal directive from the Social Security Administration now closes the door on that possibility.
The policy change marks a reversal of a trend where the Social Security Administration was making it easier for transgender individuals to change the “sex” on their record to reflect their gender identity.
In 2013, the Obama administration eliminated a requirement that a person needed to undergo gender confirmation surgery to change the sex field on their records, instead accepting a note from a physician certifying that a person had undergone a gender transition.
In 2022, the Biden administration allowed individuals to self-select their gender marker without providing medical documentation — which, as Geidner notes, was the original policy of the Social Security Administration from its inception until 1980, when the agency began requiring documentation showing that “sex-change surgery has been started.”
That surgical requirement was bolstered subsequently in 2002 and 2003 to require proof from a surgeon that a person seeking to change the sex on their record had completed gender confirmation surgery.
The policy change aligns with President Trump’s executive order stating that the U.S. government will only recognize two sexes, male and female, based on a person’s assigned sex at birth.
The acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, Michelle King, is a Trump appointee.
The “emergency message” contained instructions for employees directing them not to accept changes to the gender marker on a person’s Social Security record.
“An individual’s sex data is male (M) or female (F). In accordance with the recent presidential actions under Executive Order ‘Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to The Federal Government,’ sex field data changes on the NUMIDENT must not be accepted or processed.”
The message directed field offices to inform those seeking to change the sex listed on their records that the sex field cannot be changed. If an individual contacts the administration’s call center to ask about changing the sex field, employees are instructed to inform the person that “we are not able to accept or process a sex field change.”
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