Trans man Louis Birney requested that the New York City Department of Health correct his birth certificate. When they refused, he took them to court. He won.
From the Washington Post, emphasis mine:
[In order to grant the correction] The Health Department called for more details on the “reconstruction procedure,” plus a psychiatric evaluation and a physician’s record of a post-operative examination.
The ruling, made public last week, orders the city Health Department to re-evaluate [Birney’s] request and questions the agency’s understanding of “the lives and experience of transgender people.” It marks something of a victory for advocates seeking to make it easier for people who have changed gender to change their identity documents.
“I hope that the Department of Health will really take this to heart and really see that the court is, in this decision, recognizing the importance of respecting the identities of transgender individuals,” said Erica Kagan, a lawyer for the man, Louis Birney, who declined to be interviewed.
“It does not seem very likely that an individual would go through all the years of required preparation for surgical transition, including psychotherapy, undergo major surgery, assume life under his or her new gender, and then decide it was all a mistake and change back,” Feinman wrote. “This apparent assumption tends to suggest a certain ignorance by the department of the lengthy transition process and the lives and experience of transgender people.”
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