arizona won its trans birth certificate case today. trans arizonans may have won it too.

via the Ninth Circuit's opinion, Your Valley, the Oklahoma Supreme Court and Oklahoma Voice

On paper, the state of Arizona won. The trans plaintiffs lost their injunction. And yet the most useful sentence for trans people in Arizona this year may be sitting in the losing side's opinion.

what the ninth circuit ruled

In Roe v. Johnston, filed Tuesday, a Ninth Circuit panel of Judges Andrew Hurwitz and Roopali Desai reversed a district court ruling that had blocked the part of Arizona's birth certificate law that seemed to require surgery before the sex marker could change. The panel held the statute "does not violate the Equal Protection Clause" and sent the case back down.

Then it explained why. The plaintiffs, Judge Desai wrote, "do not need an injunction from this court to grant them relief; Arizona law allows them to amend the sex marker on their birth certificates without undergoing a sex change operation." Under the statute, the opinion says, "anyone" can get a court order directing the change "without providing proof of a sex change operation," and the health department "shall amend a birth certificate if a court order directs it to do so."

That is a federal appeals court telling every trial judge in Arizona that the courthouse route exists. The plaintiffs, who are minors suing through their parents, had been turned down for those orders by state trial judges, per the opinion, and the panel called refusing one on a guess that the state "wouldn't honor it" "doubly improper." The appeal was brought by the legislature's Republican leaders, Senate President Warren Petersen and House Speaker Steve Montenegro, per the opinion's caption. The state health department, the panel noted, takes no position that it would refuse such an order. Your Valley has the local write-up.

oklahoma went the other way

Compare Oklahoma, where the state Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on Sept. 29 in Fowler v. Stitt that state law "prohibits changes to the sex designation on an Oklahoma birth certificate," and always has. The court wrote that "no longstanding agency practice" could rewrite the statute, even though, by its own account, people had been getting court-ordered changes for years and the practice "persisted with little notoriety until 2021." That was the year Gov. Kevin Stitt signed the executive order stopping it, per the opinion and The Oklahoman. The case now goes back to the Tenth Circuit, Oklahoma Voice reports.

So in one week, two courts read two very similar laws. One found a door that had always been open and pointed at it. The other found a door and said it had been painted on the wall the entire time. If you are trans, your birth certificate now depends a great deal on which state did the paperwork when you were born. Arizonans: call a lawyer, bring the opinion.