Oklahoma Bill Locking Birth Certificate Sex Designations Moves to Governor's Desk

A bill that would require Oklahoma birth certificates to list a person as either male or female, and prohibit almost any later change, is headed to Gov. Kevin Stitt. The governor is expected to sign it.

House Bill 1225 allows very few exceptions to the ban on amendments. Its authors say the measure is meant to reinforce existing state law that transgender Oklahomans are currently challenging in federal court. Critics describe it as additional discrimination.

The earlier law, Senate Bill 1100, was enacted in 2022 and prevents transgender people from changing the gender marker on their birth certificates. Three Tulsa plaintiffs, including Rowan Fowler, have sued over it, arguing it is unconstitutional. The case has not been resolved.

Fowler, a transgender woman, now lives outside Oklahoma. "I didn't leave because I wanted to leave… the pressure was getting to be too much; it was hurting my mental health," she said. She told KJRH that she misses the state.

During a Senate session on April 29, Sen. Carrie Hicks asked the bill's author, Sen. Michael Bergstrom, whether he worried the measure would prompt even more litigation. Bergstrom answered that it would not, "since we are providing clarification."

Bergstrom told the Senate floor that he developed the bill with the Oklahoma Attorney General's Office. The office confirmed this to 2 News Oklahoma and said the legislation was designed to help it in the Fowler lawsuit by clarifying that Oklahoma never allowed birth certificate changes based on gender.

Rep. Kevin West, a co-author, defended the measure by pointing to the nature of the documents. "These are permanent, vital records that the State of Oklahoma maintains, and it needs to remain what the biological reality is," he said. "If somebody transitions from male to female or vice versa, they are still biologically what they originally were."

Fowler's attorney, Peter Renn, rejected that reasoning. He said a birth certificate or other identity document matching who Fowler is harms no one else, while denying it to her "only harms transgender people… by endangering their very basic safety." Fowler called the policy discrimination aimed at "a very, very small portion of the population."

The bill cleared its most recent vote 70-17, and many Democrats have questioned why the Legislature took up the issue now, with the earlier law's challenge still pending in court.