Hello, I'm a constituent and I'm asking for you to support the passage of the Gender Recognition Act (S.4402/A.5465), a bill which removes barriers for transgender, nonbinary, and intersex New Yorkers to obtain accurate birth certificates, marriage certificates, driver's licenses, and name changes.

Mismatching ID leaves transgender and nonbinary New Yorkers open to discrimination in employment, housing, education, travel, and health care. The New York State results of the U.S. Transgender survey found that 34% of transgender New Yorkers who have presented ID that didn't match their gender presentation were denied service, verbally harassed, or even assaulted.

Unfortunately, there are a multitude of financial, logistical, and safety-related barriers to updating documents with the correct name and gender. Current processes can result in exposure by requiring the publication of personal details in a newspaper, can be prohibitively expensive by requiring letters from doctors, or simply do not yet exist – currently, the only way to “update” a marriage certificate is to get divorced and remarried! Because of these barriers, 88% of trans New Yorkers have not been able to update all their identity documents, and an incredible 63% not able to update any identity documents at all.

The Gender Recognition Act would solve these problems by removing many of these barriers and creating streamlined and privacy-protective processes in their place.

The Gender Recognition Act has already passed in the Senate - please pass it in the Assembly today!