(HorizonPost.com) – A federal appeals court last Friday upheld a district court ruling that allowed Tennessee’s policy of preventing people from changing their gender on their birth certificate to remain in effect.
In a 2-1 ruling, the three-judge panel of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals determined that Americans do not have a “fundamental right to a birth certificate” that records their so-called “gender identity” rather than their biological gender at birth.
Appellate Court Judge Jeffrey Sutton wrote in the majority opinion that the plaintiffs in the case could not establish that the state’s policy was enacted out of malice against transgender individuals since the policy had been in place for over 50 years and predated “medical diagnoses of gender dysphoria.”
Judge Sutton wrote that the information from the state’s birth certificates is used for epidemiological and statistical data that determine the provision of health services.
The lawsuit was filed in federal court in 2019 by four transgenders born in Tennessee who argued that gender was not determined by the genitalia a person is born with but by “a person’s core internal sense of their own gender.”
The plaintiffs argued that the state’s prohibition on changing the designated gender on a birth certificate had no legitimate governmental purpose and subjected transgenders who had to present their birth certificate for identification to harassment, discrimination, and violence.
The dissenting opinion, written by appellate Judge Helene White, claimed that forcing transgenders to use a birth certificate that remained unchanged would cause others to question if the individual is the same person identified on the birth certificate.
Judge White agreed with the plaintiffs that the inconsistency could cause “harm and discrimination.”
Tennessee’s Republican Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti reiterated that the designations on birth certificates should be left up to the states.
He said while other states may have taken a different approach, Tennessee had for decades “consistently recognized that a birth certificate records a biological fact” that a child born is either male or female.
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