A judge in Tippecanoe County, Indiana had decided that a person seeking a name or gender change had to publish the change in a newspaper in their home county at least three times.
On Thursday the Indiana Court of Appeals overruled that decision.
On Wednesday the Oregon Senate voted 23-6 to pass HB 2673, which removes barriers to transgender people obtaining state official document in keeping with our gender identity.
The bill now moves on to Gov. Kate Brown's desk.
Off the top, I have to say that I have no good feelings towards Idaho.
Soon after I began my transition in 1992, I traveled by bus to visit my relatives in Oregon and was arrested in the Greyhound bus terminal in Boise for using the women's bathroom...even though before the trip, I had gotten permission from Greyhound to do so.
House Bill 2673 has cleared the Oregon House on a 37-23 vote. The Bill allows people with birth certificates issued in the state to be updated in a private interaction with the Oregon Health Authority, allowing people to avoid public paper trails and court involvement.
On his last day as president (January 19) Barack Obama issued a memo to the USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Service) instructing that agency to allow transgender immigrants to request a change in gender on their official documents.
HB 1361 was introduced in the Indiana legislature on Thursday. Its intent was to block transgender Indianans from updating their birth certificates.
The intent of this bill is to strip transgender people of the most basic and fundamental dignity.
HB 1361 seeks to deny the very existence of transgender people—with the cruel mandate that a transgender person’s birth certificate can never match the identity they live as and the person they have always known themselves to be.
--Freedom Indiana
But the bill encountered what appears on the surface to be a sane republican.
A week and a half ago I shared the story of Shivi, a transman who is a student at Cal-Berkeley and whose parents tried to arrange a marriage for him with a man in India, to "fix his sexuality." (Parents traffic their child to India as attempted cure for the trans). Though Shivi was born in India, he has lived in the US since the age of three.
When last we saw, Shivi (who only uses the one name) was stuck in India because his mother had stolen his passport, green card and cellphone, and returned to the US with his siblings). His father, a researcher in the US, tried to enroll him as a girl at Dayalbagh University in Agra. But Shivi got access to her grandparents internet and contacted friends in the US who put him in touch with the LGBT NGO Nazarya. Members of Nazaraya helped Shivi escape from Agra and go to Delhi, where he filed a petition with the Delhi High Court claiming he had been wronged by his parents. The High Court found in his favor and granted Shivi an order of protection.
