Thanks to an appeal from the South Royalton Legal Clinic at Vermont Law and Graduate School, parents in Vermont will be able to use a nonbinary gender marker of their child’s initial birth certificate.
“We felt that by telling people they have to choose one of the binary genders and then can later amend, it delegitimizes the nonbinary gender marker,” Meg York, lead attorney for the clinic’s LGBTQ+ Family Law Project, told VT Digger. “It implies that ‘M’ or ‘F’ are really the true genders.”
Reports VTDigger:
Last year, the passage of Act 88 streamlined the process by which Vermonters could amend their birth certificates to reflect their gender identities, including using a third gender marker, X. The law, championed by Rep. Taylor Small, P/D-Winooski, cut out doctors, judges and extensive documents from the process.
“Identity validation in and of itself saves lives,” Small said on the House floor in February 2022.
At the time, Vermont joined 14 other states and Washington, D.C., in allowing the amended nonbinary marker.
But before the South Royalton legal clinic’s recent appeal in probate court, Vermonters could only amend birth certificates to include an X, not use the X initially.
The change, York said, is in line with the clinic’s goal to make “the most lives livable.”
The nonbinary gender marker on initial birth certificates is important because it “acts as a placeholder until the child can identify with a gender on their own,” York said, and eliminates part of the battle that “transgender, gender nonconforming, gender nonbinary, gender fluid, gender queer, and other agender people go through to override or justify nonconformity with their original gender designation.”
Read the complete VT Digger story here.
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