Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signed into law a bill on Tuesday that bans the option to indicate a nonbinary gender on state birth certificates.
While many states only provide the option of male or female on birth certificates, the latest move from the Republican governor makes Oklahoma the first state to ban the nonbinary option explicitly via legislation.
SB 1100 also bars people from changing the gender on their birth certificates.
At the time, the Oklahoma governor said the state health department was doing so without permission under Oklahoma law.
The Oklahoma State Department of Health had reached a settlement in May 2021 in which it agreed to add nonbinary as an option on birth certificates. This stemmed from a case in which Kit Lorelied, a person who identifies as nonbinary and born in Oklahoma, sued after the department initially refused Lorelied’s request to identify as nonbinary on the birth certificate.
Republican state Rep. Sheila Dills, one of the co-sponsors of the latest measure, Senate Bill 1100, said the bill is codifying Stitt’s executive order into law.
The bill was first proposed in February 2022. The measure passed in a party-line vote of 75–16 in the state House on April 21, before reaching Stitt’s desk.
Dills, in the closing debate, said: “The question before us is very simple. Do we want the truth on a birth certificate, a legal document, representing a person’s biological sex, or do we want a lie.”
In a statement after the bill passed the House, Dills said in a statement: “People are free to believe whatever they want about their identity, but science has determined people are either biologically male or female at birth.
“We want clarity and truth on official state documents. Information should be based on established medical fact and not an ever-changing social dialogue.”
“I find it a very extreme and grotesque use of power in this body to write this law and try to pass it—when literally none of them live like us,” Turner posted on Twitter the day the bill was debated.
