A law that allows people to change their birth certificate to reflect their gender identity without a court order, surgery, or a doctor’s note, just took effect in Colorado on Jan. 1.
Gov. Jared Polis, Colorado’s first openly gay governor, signed the bill into law in May. The law allows transgender and nonbinary residents of Colorado to change their name on their birth certificate to reflect their new gender identity. They can also revise their gender to “M,” “F,” or, my personal favorite, “X.”
The bill is named Jude’s Law, after a transgender student who started testifying at the Capitol in support of the proposal at just 9-years-old. Colorado Democrats have tried to pass a bill like this for several years now. However, they should consider the cautionary tale of James Shupe.
Shupe was the first “legally nonbinary person” in the United States. Shupe transitioned from male to female, then to nonbinary. In 2016, an Oregon court ruled Shupe could change his gender to nonbinary. However, that landmark was short-lived.
Through therapy, Shupe realized his desire to transition was due to significant trauma. He now not only lives as a male, matching his birth sex, but he just successfully petitioned the court to allow him to change his legal sex back to “male.” Shupe called his desire to be recognized as nonbinary a “psychologically harmful legal fiction.”
I reached out to Shupe for comment on Colorado’s new birth certificate law. He said:
Laws like this that favor people who desire to change their gender identity, without being forced to follow any medical processes or procedures, are harmful in many ways. Not only do they hijack language to mean whatever they want it to mean, but the concept of transgenderism and changeable gender identity nearly eradicates the notion of biological women altogether. If biological males who want to identify as women are women, what makes a woman or girl female, exactly? The manifest unfairness of this thinking is especially obvious in sports, where transgender women, biological males, are now regularly besting biological women.
Advocates of the Colorado birth certificate law went to great lengths to demonstrate that the law had bipartisan support and that members of the LGBT community are behind it. Yet Shupe pushed back on this and instead argued that legal recognition for changing genders actually undercuts homosexuality. He said, “There’s not a single part of transgenderism that couldn’t be done or performed under the gay umbrella, instead of the legal fiction of another sex.”
There’s another problem with the law, besides the fact that it defies objective biological reality.
The transgender birth certificate measure is called “Jude’s Law,” named after a transgender teenager who had been lobbying for it since age nine. Jude told the Colorado Sun the bill’s passage was “surreal” and “amazing.” The state should not be passing laws that primarily affect teenagers or adults due to the arguments of a child. To be fair, laws are named after children all the time, but they are often spearheaded by the child’s parents in favor of a safety-related cause such as Megan’s Law.
I have an eight and 10-year-old: I can tell you without a doubt they care about playing with their friends and Minecraft — and would eat cheese pizza all day if you let them. Not only are they not mature enough to understand sexuality or gender differences, but the only cause they’re interested in advocating for is sleepovers with their friends on the weekends and unlimited bowls of macaroni and cheese at dinner, followed by ice cream for dessert.
That a state would pass a law allowing for people to change the gender on their birth certificate as arbitrarily as one might purchase a home and sign “Captain America” on the loan is a callous treatment of a legal document and complete disregard for the importance of language. That this bill is at least in part based on a child’s (undoubtedly endearing and compelling) testimony seems irresponsible to the point of absurdity.
Legislation such as Colorado’s new birth certificate law defies the laws of biology, disregards the language that defines reality, and does it all at the behest of a poster child who is still, quite literally, a child.
Nicole Russell (@russell_nm) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota.
