A Big Victory Down In Nevada

Among all the doom and gloom there was a bright ray of hope. Down in Nevada they just passed a policy to allow us to change our birth certificates with surgery but more important without a doctors letters!

VICTORY: Nevada passes the most progressive birth certificate gender change policy in the nation!
NCTE Blog
By: Arli Christian
November 21, 2016

NCTE is incredibly pleased to salute the Nevada Department of Public and Behavioral Health for passing an updated birth certificate gender change policy for people born in Nevada. The policy became official last week and is groundbreaking as the first non-medicalized birth certificate gender change standard in the United States! We hope this breakthrough sets a standard for other states, establishing that private medical information is irrelevant to having an accurate identity document that reflects a person’s gender.

Under Nevada’s new regulations, an individual born in Nevada can get a new birth certificate issued with a corrected gender marker if they submit (1) their own affidavit stating their gender and requesting that the gender marker should be corrected on their certificate, and (2) a second affidavit from someone else who knows them, or other verifiable evidence, confirming the facts in their affidavit. The second affidavit can be from anyone who has personal knowledge of the applicant’s gender, meaning anyone who knows the applicant’s gender firsthand through a personal, familial, medical, or professional relationship. These affidavits can confirm transition-related medical or mental health treatment or otherwise confirm an individual’s gender identity and the gender they live as every day.

Nevada’s unique approach to correcting the gender marker on a birth certificate treats the process the same as correcting other items on vital statistics certificates, such as the date of birth or death, the location of birth or death, an occupation, etc. The Department of Public and Behavioral Health intentionally and intelligently designed this regulation to treat standards of proof for all corrections to certificates uniformly and equally. The new policy replaces Nevada’s old standard that required a court order establishing the individual had a ‘sexual transformation’ to update the birth certificate.

NCTE worked hard to achieve this groundbreaking new policy alongside our wonderful state partners, Gender Justice Nevada and the Transgender Allies Group, and coordinated closely with the Nevada Department of Public and Behavioral Health to assist them in developing this modernized regulation. Congratulations to Nevada for your innovative efforts to make updated and accurate birth certificates available for all transgender people!

NCTE continues to push efforts to modernize identity document policies at the state and local level. For more information about the policies in your state, visit the ID Documents Center.

This is really a great step forward, for many trans people getting a letter from a is too costly for them and this new policy just removed most of the cost (there will probably be a small fee to get the documents notarized).

When we were working to pass Connecticut birth certificate law NCTE was one of the organizations that helped us.