Judge: Idaho can prevent transgender people from changing sex on birth certificate

A federal judge on Thursday lifted a years-long ban on Idaho’s law that prevents transgender people from amending their gender on their birth certificate. 

The state had been blocked from enforcing the policy since a 2018 federal court order found that it violated the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. 

The order was in response to Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador’s request made in October to remove the block, citing a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that limited such broad-reaching bans. 

“For years, Idaho was blocked from enforcing common-sense policy and law requiring birth certificates to reflect biological sex recorded at birth,” Labrador said in a press release Friday. “Birth certificates aren’t symbolic documents that are subject to how an individual may feel, they’re legal records used in medicine, public health research, and identification. Idaho can now enforce our law protecting accurate vital records, while treating all Idahoans equally under the same amendment process.”

The nation’s high court ruled that federal judges can, in most cases, only place injunctions on laws that affect the plaintiffs in the case. In a court agreement filed Dec. 5, 2025, both sides of the case agreed that one of the transgender plaintiffs had already received their amended birth certificate and the other had chosen to remove themselves from the case. 

The lawsuit was filed in 2017 by attorneys from Lambda Legal on behalf of a transgender Idahoan woman and was later amended to add another trans woman from Idaho as plaintiff against officials from the Department of Health and Welfare and Bureau of Vital Records and Health Statistics. 

Peter Renn, senior counsel at Lambda Legal and one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, told the Idaho Capital Sun in an email Friday that the change was in response to the Supreme Courts’ prior decision and “the fact that the original case wasn’t filed as a class action,” which a type of lawsuit brought on behalf an entire group of similarly situated people.  

“But nothing prevents a new case from being filed, and what hasn’t changed is that forcing transgender people to present birth certificates and driver’s licenses that out themselves as transgender when navigating everyday life is dangerous, archaic, and still very much unconstitutional,” Renn wrote. 

 “We anticipate that Lambda Legal may hear from Idahoans who are harmed by this development, especially because we understand that people born in Idaho may no longer be able to update the gender on their Idaho driver’s licenses to match their gender identity without access to birth certificates that reflect who they are.” 

Idaho previously had to pay over $300,000 over 2020 law that violated court order 

Despite the 2018 federal order that prohibited the state from automatically rejecting applications from transgender individuals to change the sex listed on their birth certificate, the Idaho Legislature in 2020 passed a law that limited ways birth certificates could be amended and prevented transgender individuals from changing their document. 

Later that year, a federal magistrate court again barred the state from automatically rejecting transgender Idahoans’ applications, and the court ordered the health agency to “institute a meaningful and constitutionally-sound process for accepting, reviewing, and considering applications from transgender individuals to amend the gender listed on their birth certificates,” Idaho Public Television reported.  

The court ordered that the state pay the transgender Idahoans who sued more than $300,000 for legal fees. 

Under Idaho’s law, to amend a birth certificate within one year of its issuance, Idahoans must provide a notarized affidavit declaring information was incorrectly recorded. After a year, corrections require a court action showing “fraud, duress, or material mistake of fact.”