Social Security Administration – Original Photo: Bruce Bortin, Flickr CC
The U.S. Social Security Administration has stopped allowing people to make changes to the gender marker, also known as “sex identification,” on their Social Security records.
As first reported by Metro Weekly alum Chris Geidner, writing for his Law Dork Substack, the Social Security Administration imposed the “emergency” change last Friday. It went into effect “immediately.”
The “emergency message,” issued internally, stated, “Effective immediately, we can no longer process changes to the sex field on the NUMIDENT,” a reference to the Numerical Identification System, which contains the information provided to obtain a Social Security number, including a person’s sex.
In the first days of the second Trump administration, the Social Security Administration took down a webpage outlining how to change one’s sex identification. However, there had been anecdotal reports of changes still being allowed.
The internal directive from the Social Security Administration now closes the door on that possibility.
The policy change marks a reversal of a trend where the Social Security Administration was making it easier for transgender individuals to change the “sex” on their record to reflect their gender identity.
In 2013, the Obama administration eliminated a requirement that a person needed to undergo gender confirmation surgery to change the sex field on their records, instead accepting a note from a physician certifying that a person had undergone a gender transition.
In 2022, the Biden administration allowed individuals to self-select their gender marker without providing medical documentation — which, as Geidner notes, was the original policy of the Social Security Administration from its inception until 1980, when the agency began requiring documentation showing that “sex-change surgery has been started.”
That surgical requirement was bolstered subsequently in 2002 and 2003 to require proof from a surgeon that a person seeking to change the sex on their record had completed gender confirmation surgery.
The policy change aligns with President Trump’s executive order stating that the U.S. government will only recognize two sexes, male and female, based on a person’s assigned sex at birth.
The acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, Michelle King, is a Trump appointee.
The “emergency message” contained instructions for employees directing them not to accept changes to the gender marker on a person’s Social Security record.
“An individual’s sex data is male (M) or female (F). In accordance with the recent presidential actions under Executive Order ‘Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to The Federal Government,’ sex field data changes on the NUMIDENT must not be accepted or processed.”
The message directed field offices to inform those seeking to change the sex listed on their records that the sex field cannot be changed. If an individual contacts the administration’s call center to ask about changing the sex field, employees are instructed to inform the person that “we are not able to accept or process a sex field change.”
Lawmakers in the Montana House of Representatives defeated two anti-LGBTQ bills last week after the chamber's transgender and nonbinary representatives gave impassioned speeches protesting the measures.
State Rep. Zooey Zephyr (D-Missoula), the legislature's first out transgender representative, spoke out against House Bill 675, sponsored by Rep. Caleb Hinkle (R-Belgrade), which sought to ban drag performances and Pride parades in Montana.
Hinkle previously sponsored a ban on public performances of a "sexual nature" that was specifically intended to target drag shows and Drag Queen Story Hour-type events (even if they do not contain sexually explicit content).
A transgender protester from Illinois was arrested for washing her hands in the women's bathroom at the Florida State Capitol.
But it wasn't because she was outed or reported to the police by another person.
Rather, she outed herself.
According to the Miami Herald, 20-year-old college student Marcy Rheintgen alerted Florida lawmakers of her intention to use the women's restroom in protest of the state's 2023 transgender bathroom ban, which prohibits transgender individuals from using bathrooms matching their gender identity in public buildings, universities, schools, public parks, or correctional institutions.
Sheriff's deputies accused Kalaya Morton of being a "man" due to her gender expression, demonstrating how cis women can be targeted by anti-trans restroom laws.
A Black 19-year-old cisgender lesbian from Phoenix says she was humiliated after Pima County Sheriff's deputies barged into a Walmart women's restroom in Tucson that she was using last month.
Kalaya Morton, who describes herself as a "stud," and is a masculine-presenting woman, says she believes the deputies were called by a store employee who assumed she was transgender.
Speaking with The Advocate, Morton said she had entered the store restroom on February 19, along with her ex-girlfriend, who had handed her a tampon, when two male deputies stormed in, shining flashlights into the stall where she was using the toilet. They demanded that she exit the restroom.
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