Texas Just Quietly Revoked Trans People's Ability to Change Their Birth Certificates

Texas Just Quietly Revoked Trans People’s Ability to Change Their Birth Certificates
The Department of State Health Services simply removed the option on a publicly available form.
BY NICO LANG
September 3, 2024

Texas has stopped allowing trans people to correct the gender marker on their birth certificates, according to LGBTQ+ advocacy groups in the state.

On Friday, the Transgender Education Network of Texas (TENT), the state’s largest trans advocacy organization, reported that the Department of State Health Services (DSHS) removed the option to amend an individual’s sex in the application form to correct birth certificates. TENT provided screenshots to Them, appearing to show form VS-170, the application used for birth certificate corrections, before and after the recent changes. The form bearing a revision date of January 21 allows applicants to “correct child’s date of birth, place of birth, time of birth, or sex” in Box #1 located on Page Two. But as of August 24, the form no longer includes birth-assigned sex as a potential reason for records corrections.

Also missing from the current version of the form available on the DSPS website is the previous option to “correct child’s sex after medical/surgical change,” which formerly allowed both youth and adults to update their birth records after beginning the process of medically transitioning. That phrase has been replaced with an option to “correct child’s sex due to incompletion or inaccuracy.”


Birth certificates
Left: Form VS-170 dated January 2021; Right: Form VS-170 dated August 2024
Courtesy of TENT

“We are still working with our legal partners to understand these changes,” TENT noted in a Friday Instagram post.

These changes were not publicly announced by DSHS prior to their apparent adoption, according to Andrea Segovia, a senior policy and field organizer for TENT. She says that her organization first became aware of updates to the birth certificate correction process when several trans clients reached out to TENT for help after their applications had been denied. Segovia says that DSHS did not provide a reason for the refusals, which she adds is not uncommon in cases where corrections were rejected simply due to clerical error. TENT had been hoping that would be the case in these instances and that they were merely mistakes.

Trans Texans have been able to correct their legal gender marker since at least 2009, according to TENT, and taking that option away has placed countless trans Texans in limbo. Segovia says the organization wants to remind trans Texans that their identities are valid, no matter what rules state agencies make and unmake.

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