Pro Bono Spotlight
By
Michael Phillis | February 7, 2021, 8:02 PM EST
The ACLU of Ohio, along with attorneys at Thompson Hine LLP and Lambda Legal, recently successfully challenged Ohio's policy forbidding transgender people from correcting their birth certificates to match their gender identity, convincing a judge that the state's policy was discriminatory.
Driver's licenses and other documents could reflect an individual's real identity, but around 2016, Ohio started refusing to allow people to correct what plaintiffs called the "gender marker" on their birth certificate, according to Elizabeth Bonham, an attorney with the ACLU of Ohio. Advocates thought there was no legitimate reasoning behind the policy and sued in 2018, challenging a state approach they said made life for transgender people more difficult.