Alabama will now require sterilization to change sex markers

This morning, journalist Erin Reed reported that the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals overruled a lower court’s decision on Alabama’s sex marker changes, effectively mandating trans people sterilize themselves in order to get their driver’s licenses updated to reflect their actual gender.

This ruling overturns the past three years of precedent whereby Alabama allowed people to change their sex markers without requiring any type of bottom surgery. Now, however, this surgery is mandated in order to legally transition.

The lawsuit was brought by three trans women who experienced discrimination because of the driver’s license policy outing them as transgender. One woman, who is a firefighter, was barricaded in a burning hot room and forced to get third-degree burns while her colleagues called her a “freak.” Another lost her job because of it, while another was berated by a driver’s exam employee due to the mismatch.

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The court made bizarre arguments in its own favor, including denying that discrimination against trans people is gender-based discrimination, suggesting that genderfluid people would have “on demand new genders to suit every new identity” in spite of ‘X’ markers being well accepted in numerous different states. They also claimed that access to an accurate gender marker is not a “government benefit.”

The ruling was backed by all three judge: Judge Elizabeth Branch, a Trump appointee, Judge Ed Carnes, a Bush appointee, and Judge Jill Pryor an Obama appointee. Pryor reluctantly agreed to the decision, drawing from court precedent in agreeing with her colleagues. She says she does not blame the majority and instead goes back to prior case law.

“I understand that without the ability to change the sex designations on their licenses, transgender Alabamians will likely suffer abuse and even violence when their licenses reveal, in everyday transactions, that they are transgender,” Judge Pryor explained. “Because our precedent compels the conclusion that classifications targeting transgender individuals are subject to rational basis review, not intermediate scrutiny, however, I reluctantly and with grave misgivings concur in the majority opinion’s judgment.”

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