Judge ends Arizona's "irrational" policy requiring surgery for updating gender markershttps://www.lgbtqnation.com/2025/10/judge-ends-arizonas-irrational-policy-requiring-surgery-for-updating-gender-markers/ 🔗Faefyx Collington (2 Oct 2025)
A federal judge in Arizona has ruled that transgender people are no longer required to get gender-affirming surgeries in order to update their birth certificates to align with their gender identity.
"We are grateful that the Court ruled in Plaintiffs' favor and found that this outdated requirement violated Plaintiffs' constitutional rights," said Rachel Berg, a staff attorney for the National Center for LGBTQ Rights (NCLR)...
The ruling instructs the Arizona Department of Health Services to ignore the state's law that requires proof of surgery to be able to amend gender markers on a birth certificate. A correction of one's gender marker on the document still requires a doctor to attest that the patient is living as a different gender from the one assigned at birth.
In August last year, the same federal judge, James Soto (who was appointed by former President Barack Obama), made a similar ruling recommending that the Department of Health Services reconsider the surgical requirement for amending a birth certificate.
Soto highlighted that the requirement risked forcing trans people into unnecessary surgeries in order to live authentically or risk outing themselves in potentially dangerous situations. After a failure to act from the Department of Health Services, this week's ruling from Judge Soto takes the matter out of their hands.
Earlier this year, Arizona Republicans tried to pass legislation to ban gender marker changes on trans people's birth certificates entirely. While that bill passed both the state's House and Senate, it was vetoed by Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs.
The governor upheld her promise to veto any anti-trans bills that made it to her desk, saying the legislature should "focus on real issues that matter and impact people's everyday lives."
