IL – WTF?

[UPDATE: Here’s a link to the complaint in Kirk v. Arnold]

In a state that does not have a transsexual birth certificate statute, if an administrative agency nevertheless decides to recogize the reality of transsexualism and amend/re-issue birth certificates of transsexuals, courts will step in and say that the statute – whose silence on transsexualism is license to neanderthals to judicially legislate anti-transsexual intent – rules, effectively invalidating the administrative rule.

So, if the statute in question actually is a transsexual birth certificate statute but an administrative agency decides to add restrictions to said statute that the elected representatives of the people could have put into the statute but did not, then the statute should control, right?

Lets hope that the ACLU can get Illinois courts to do what’s right.

From NBC Chicago:

In December 2007, Rothkopf was finally able to become the person she always felt she was, undergoing gender reassignment surgery in Thailand. She felt the one-step surgery offered there would be medically safer than two-step procedures here in the United States.

Upon returning to her home in Wisconsin, Rothkopf was able to amend her passport, driver’s license, and Social Security records to reflect her current sex without any problems.

However, much to her dismay, the ‘M’ on her birth certificate remains.

The Illinois Department of Vital Records refuses to correct the document because the surgery took place outside the United States.

Since 1961, the state has allowed qualifying individuals to change the gender on an original birth certificate. But in 2004, the Vital Records department enacted a policy change which only allowed this option if the surgery was performed by a U.S.-licensed physician.

Not to quibble, but its actually been since 1955 (the mistake is easy to make, though; I’ve made it myself.)

Now, aside from the fact that this appears to be a clear case of the administrative-oids usurping legislative authority, lets think about the historical stupidity of such an interpretation of a statute that was enacted eleven (or even only five) years before any official program leading to SRS was established in the United States.  This 2004 insanity – had it been promulgated in 1955 – would have meant that, in all likelihood, no one would have been eligible to use the statute; ditto if one utilizes the 1961 enactment date (BTW – the difference is that, in 1955, the Illinois Legislature enacted a stand-alone birth certificate statute, only one page in length.  I was unaware of this statute for a long while, but I was familiar with the state’s 1961 enactment of a complete revision of its Vital Statistics Act, a precursor to was later promulgated as the Model Vital Statistics Act and enacted by many states – both of which contained transsexual birth certificate provisions.)

“We are following the Vital Records Act, and we are simply enforcing that,” department spokesperson Melaney Arnold said, according to the Sun-Times. “The part that we are particularly looking at is the definition of ‘physician’. ‘Physician’ means a person licensed to practice medicine in Illinois or any other state.”

Again, think about the time frame of the transsexual birth certificate statute.

I smell bullshit.

It sounds to me like some Blanchard-Bailey-Dreger acolytes have infiltrated the Department of Vital Records.

[T]wo Illinois-born women, along with the American Civil Liberties Union, filed a lawsuit against the state Tuesday, stating that the denials to change their birth certificates are a violation of state law.

When the ACLU asked the department why the policy change was put into place, they never received an explanation.

Again – I smell bullshit.

I wish the women (and the ACLU) well.

As should we all.

If the oldest transsexual birth certificate statute in the country can be eviscerated by unelected, unaccountable paper-pushers, then we’re all in greater danger than even my cynicism had allowed me to believe.