A bill to allow transgender people born in New Jersey to change the sex listed on on their birth certificate without being required to have undergone surgery rises for the third time today.

Though New Jersey has issued changed birth certificates to residents who undergo sex reassignment surgery since the nineteen-eighties, those who do not want or cannot afford surgery have no recourse. A new version of the bill goes to the Senate Health, Human Services and Senior Citizens Committee Thursday.

On the previous two occasions the bill appeared, it was passed, only to be vetoed by Governor Chris Christie, who claimed that the bill opened the door for "fraud, deception and abuse."

The last time the bill was vetoed Republicans who had supported the bill "chose not to buck the governor when the Senate moved to override." Sponsor Jennifer Beck (R-11), Robert Singer (R-30), Gerry Cardinale (R-39), Tom Kean, Jr. (R-21), and Kevin O'Toole (R-40) all voted against an override despite initially voting in favor of the bill. The override failed 26-14, five votes short of the necessary number. Since the Senate has not changed since then, any chance of passage relies on additional Republicans being willing to abandon Christie.

Though some saw a chink in Christie’s armor when the Senate voted to override a gun control bill last fall, that effort came up three votes short in the Assembly. With the Democrats now enjoying an even greater majority in the Assembly after the 2015 election, the bill could have a slim shot at success if five more Republican senators break away and send an override on to the lower house where the four new sitting Democrats could put it over the top.

Senator Singer, for one, doesn’t think that Christie has fallen that far. Though the Senate gun control override would have been unthinkable before Christie’s ill-starred presidential campaign and his sinking approval rates at home, Singer said that Christie’s signature will be only thing that gets the bill through.

The question is going to be: ‘Is the governor going to sign it’?

We’re going to have to see. I don’t think anything has changed with him.

--Singer who says he will support the bill