Tennessee Judges Deliver Blow to Transgender Rights

by Daniel Johnson

July 16, 2024

The July 12 ruling was issued by 6th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Jeffrey Sutton, who wrote in the majority opinion that the state’s ruling predates any known cases of gender dysphoria.

In a 2-1 decision, a panel of judges in Tennessee ruled that a state law forbidding citizens to change the sex assigned to them at birth did not constitute unconstitutional discrimination against transgender individuals. The July 12 ruling was issued by 6th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Jeffrey Sutton, who wrote in the majority opinion that the state’s ruling predates any known cases of gender dysphoria. 

“There is no fundamental right to a birth certificate recording gender identity instead of biological sex,” Sutton wrote in the ruling, according to ABC News. The decision upheld a 2023 ruling by a Tennessee district court.

According to Sutton, the practice of policy in Tennessee as it relates to gender identity is “all over the map.” He also questioned how cultural norms should be allowed to dictate governmental practice. “How, it’s worth asking, could a government keep uniform records of any sort if the disparate views of its citizens about shifting norms in society controlled the government’s choices of language and of what information to collect?”

The suit, which was brought by four transgender women born in Tennessee, argued that sex is not actually determined by the genitalia a person has at birth but by gender identity, which the lawsuit defined as “a person’s core internal sense of their own gender.”

The lawsuit claimed that Tennessee’s practice of prohibiting people from changing their birth certificates had no actual basis in the interest of the government. At the same time, its impact on the state’s transgender population was discrimination, harassment, and violence. 

Sutton’s opinion was answered by a dissenting opinion from Judge Helene White.

“Forcing a transgender individual to use a birth certificate indicating sex assigned at birth causes others to question whether the individual is indeed the person stated on the birth certificate,” Judge White wrote, according to Courthouse News. “This inconsistency also invites harm and discrimination.”

White continued, “The majority looks past the fact that the policy classifies people as male and female in deciding whether individuals may receive amended birth certificates indicating one sex or another. The state denigrates those who do not conform to societal assumptions about what it means to be male or female, like transgender individuals, conveying that they are somehow less male or female because of the accidents of their birth—that no matter what, in the eyes of the state, their genitalia at birth alone determines their identities forevermore.”