California state-issued identification documents will describe their holders by “gender identity” rather than sex beginning in 2019.
On Sunday, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law a bill that aims “to ensure intersex, transgender, and nonbinary people have state-issued identification documents that provide full legal recognition of their accurate gender identity.”
In addition to male and female, the law will allow Californians to list their gender as nonbinary on state documents. As BuzzFeed reported, it also “eases the process of legal gender changes of any kind — male to female, female to male, and either male or female to nonbinary — by removing requirements to obtain a doctor’s statement or appear in person in court.”
Though the guidelines were rescinded under President Trump, the Obama administration instructed public schools to “treat a student’s gender identity as the student’s sex for purposes of Title IX” in the spring of 2016.
In effect, California’s law, like the Obama-era guidance, amounts to an official acknowledgement that gender is an identity people chose, rather than a binary category rooted in biological sex. As institutions increasingly recognize the concept of gender identity in formal capacities, the importance of biological sex differences will continue to diminish — a goal progressive activists are not ashamed to embrace. The consequences, however, could be more serious than we realize.
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
