Thursday, July 19, 2018

Another Win

This time in Puerto Rico. There are many states that do not allow birth certificates to be changed but the territory of Puerto Rico just changed their rules on birth certificates.
Puerto Rico allowing transgender people to fix birth certificates
Channel New Asia
17 July 2018

MIAMI: Transgender people in Puerto Rico can now modify their birth certificates to match their gender identity, after activists won a lawsuit against the US territory's governor.

The change, which went into effect Monday (Jul 16), will comply with a ruling from the US District Court for Puerto Rico, which in April struck down the island's policy preventing transgender people living there from correcting gender on birth certificates.

"The right to identify our own existence lies at the heart of one's humanity," wrote US District Judge Carmen Consuelo Cerezo at the time. "And so, we must heed their voices: 'the woman that I am,' 'the man that I am.'"

The latest victory for the LGBT community leaves just three US states that prohibit amending the gender marker on the official identification documents: Kansas, Ohio and Tennessee.
I think that it is going to be very hard to get the last states to change their policies on birth certificates because I believe that they are doing to spite the trans community. But I applaud Puerto Rico for changes their policy on BC even though it took a court order, they could have appealed the ruling but didn’t.

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