Utah residents can change the sex designation on their birth certificates, the state’s Supreme Court said Thursday in a ruling hailed as a victory for transgender rights.
In a 4-1 decision, the court found that Utahns have “a common-law right to change facets of their personal legal status, including their sex designation” and required a lower court to grant the petitions of two transgender plaintiffs seeking to make such changes.
The state Supreme Court took up the case after Sean Childers-Gray, who was born female but identifies as male, and Angie Rice, who was born male but identifies as female, petitioned a district court to change the legal sex markers on their birth certificates because they do not reflect their gender identities.
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That court rejected their petitions, saying that state law lacked a statute governing sex marker changes, making the issue nonjusticiable. If it were to apply the state’s name-change standard to sex change petitions, it “was undoubtedly bound to affect others‘ rights,” according to the Supreme Court’s summary.
“The plain language of the statute compels the conclusion that the legislature deliberately omitted from the statute any standard for approving a sex change,” the Supreme Court’s decision said. “In so doing, it expected the judiciary to exercise its common-law authority to create such a standard. And we do so today.”
In a dissent, Associate Justice Thomas Lee asserted that the court’s decision amounted to a reformation of state law.
“This is not a case about personal interactions or individual morality. It is a case about government records and the legal grounds for amending them,” Lee wrote. “Those grounds are controlled by law. And the law in question leaves no room for the decision made by this court today.”
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The Utah high court’s decision follows a development in a similar case in Ohio, where transgender plaintiffs sued the state health department after the agency’s policy prevented them from amending the sex markers on their birth certificates.
The health department said in an April 22 court filing that it is working to comply with a Dec. 16, 2020, court ruling enjoining Ohio from enforcing its birth certificate policy and that it plans to have a method in place before June 1 allowing people to amend their documents.
