“Changing birth certificates for desired genders is falsifying records,” Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita said, announcing that he is filing motions to intervene in cases where Indiana trial courts have ordered the Indiana Department of Health (IDOH) to change the designation of sex on birth certificates to reflect preferred gender identities.
“One should have no more ability to change the listed sex on a birth certificate years after the fact than to change the newborn’s listed length or weight,” Rokita explained in his office’s press release.
“If we allow people to come to court on a Tuesday because they feel like they’re a girl, when on Monday, it was clear, and on Tuesday it’s clear, that they are a man,” it will “make chaos and a mockery out of out of official government documents,” AG Rokita said in an interview with Indiana’s WISH News 8.
“These [trial court] orders, ordering, for example, the Department of Health to change for certificates were done without any participation by Department of Health, or any state agency,” Deputy Attorney General Bradley Davis told WISH.
No sane country would allow this, “so we are not going to let that happen here,” Rokita said:
“If they really think they’re a girl, and they’re a boy, they should go get help and we want them to get help, but affirming their sickness, affirming their dysphoria, and it is a sickness, shouldn’t be what we do here.”
“We’re taking a stand not only for the rule of law but also for common sense,” Rokita said in his announcement.
“Indiana law requires birth certificates to reflect the historical, immutable fact of a child’s sex,” AG Rokita explained.
Additionally, Rokita notes that Indiana Governor Mike Braun signed an executive order in March of this year instructing state agencies to interpret and apply “sex” to mean “an individual human being’s immutable biological classification as either male or female” as determined at conception.
The executive order says it was issued for the purpose of “respecting the biological dichotomy between men and women as a fundamental & deeply rooted legal principle embedded in Indiana law.”
Nonetheless, in dozens of instances, trial courts have ordered IDOH to change the historical record of a newborn’s sex, prompting AG Rokita’s motions to intervene in order to “protect the integrity” of the state’s legal processes of issuing birth certificates.