Montana has enacted one of the most stringent sets of birth certificate alteration restrictions in the country, virtually prohibiting trans and intersex persons from updating those vital papers to fit their identities.
The Treasure State had earlier established a "emergency regulation" that substituted "sex" for the gender marker on birth certificates. Adam Meier, director of Montana Public Health and Human Services, argued that the latter was "an unchangeable genetic reality that cannot be changed, even by surgery."
The law stipulates that a person's sex on their birth certificate can only be altered if it was mistakenly entered "as a consequence of a scrivener's error or a data entry error," or if the sex was first "misidentified."
According to a 2021 analysis from the Williams Institute, these are the hazards faced by many trans persons who have mismatched identification documents, which might account for around 34% of the trans population in the United States.