The What is a Woman Act Wyoming passed in 2025 is being challenged in court.
The act requires Wyoming agencies to tether their vital statistics recordkeeping to a person’s sex at birth, and it defines sex as being either “male” or “female” in strictly biological terms.
Challenges to the law’s constitutionality form just a portion of the many legal arguments a transgender Natrona County resident raised last week before the Wyoming Supreme Court — in favor of changing the sex and name on a petitioner’s Wyoming birth certificate.
The petitioner, generally identified in court documents as KR, asked Natrona County District Court Judge Josh Eames last year to order a new birth certificate showing KR as female instead of male.
KR's court filing lists the petitioner's full name on its topmost caption, or title, but uses initials only throughout its many points and arguments. KR's attorneys have asked the court to add some privacy measures to this case, and those requests are pending.
Cowboy State Daily verified with KR's attorney that KR does not already have a public-figure persona as a transgender person. At this juncture, Cowboy State Daily will identify the petitioner by initials only.
Born male but living as a transgender woman, KR had successfully petitioned a different Natrona County District Court judge for a name change in 2021. KR then had gender-related surgeries in 2023
Then in early 2025, KR asked Eames to order the Wyoming Department of Health to change KR’s birth certificate to reflect that new name, and the sex marker “F.”
Because this involved a challenge to the What is a Woman Act that the state Legislature passed that year, the Wyoming Attorney General’s Office got involved to defend the act, arguing that not only is it constitutional, it also “controls” Wyoming’s laws on how and whether to amend birth certificates.
Ultimately, Eames denied KR’s request for an order.
KR is now asking the Wyoming Supreme Court to reverse Eames’ denial.
The attorneys listed on the petition include Peter Renn of California-based Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund and Erik Oblasser of Laramie-based firm Corthell and King.
They argued in a brief filed March 13 that the What is a Woman Act violates KR’s right to privacy and is discriminatory. They also argue that Wyoming law supports rather than denies KR’s bid for an amended birth certificate, contrary to Eames’ findings.
In a Tuesday interview, Renn told Cowboy State Daily, “our client just wants to live her life in peace and quiet like everyone else, but everyone needs identity documents to navigate modern life — forcing transgender people to use documents that involuntarily disclose their status.”
This “violates their privacy and exposes them to discrimination and harassment,” continued Renn. “Nothing in Wyoming law requires and allows the government to put them in harm’s way.”
The Wyoming Attorney General’s Office has not yet filed its response, and the appeal is ongoing.
Wyoming Attorney General Keith Kautz declined Wednesday to comment on the pending case.
First, Judge Eames’ Order
Eames charted his own course through the issues in his order last autumn. He rejected KR’s arguments, but also went beyond some of Attorney General Senior Assistant Jackson Engels’ points on the law.
While Engles had emphasized that the older state laws and rules around changing birth certificates may allow sex-designation changes, but don’t mandate them, Eames came to the conclusion that those laws don’t allow such a change, and neither does the What is a Woman Act.
All of this is on the backdrop of the 2020 Wyoming Supreme Court case of MH v First Judicial District Court of Laramie County.
In that case, the Wyoming Supreme Court majority had ruled that the lower court had the authority to hear a petition by a transgender person identifying as a woman in support of changing the petitioner’s birth certificate sex designation to female.
The majority also indicated that the law could support such a change.
Then-Justice Kautz cast that as an overreach in his lone special concurring opinion.
He said the court should have adhered to the question the petitioner asked it whether the court had the authority to hear the argument, not whether the law supports the birth certificate change.
Kautz is now the Wyoming attorney general. That yields a unique turn of events that is growing more common, wherein his office hinges some of its arguments on judicial rulings that he wrote or helped to craft.
Wyoming Department of Health rules pertaining to state laws on changing birth certificates say that, “when the sex of an individual has been changed, a court order shall be required to amend the birth certificate.”
Wyoming in 2025 passed multiple laws pertaining to transgender people. Besides the What is a Woman Act, these restricted cross-sex sports participation in schools and distinguished private spaces in public facilities for females.
Gov. Mark Gordon had signed two of the laws but let the What is a Woman Act become law without his signature, saying it “begs questions of necessity and issues of practical administration” and didn’t outline any issues it sought to resolve.
With or without the act, Gordon wrote, “Wyoming citizens can rest assured Wyoming law recognizes that male and female are based on biological sex at birth — full stop.”
The Ruling
Taking all this together, Eames wrote that the high court majority’s opinion indicating state laws support changing birth certificates to reflect gender transition was “dicta.” That’s short for a longer Latin term that means “a remark, by the way.”
Judges and justices sometimes remark and opine on topics beyond the questions that cases ask them to resolve. “Dicta” are not binding like case law, though Eames said it’s wise for lower courts to err in favor of their controlling courts’ dicta.
But not always.
“In rare cases, it may be necessary to go beyond dicta in a prior case to fulfill a trial court’s duty to apply the law as it is and not as others may think it ought to be,” wrote Eames. “This situation is one such rare instance.”
The ‘Facts Of Birth’
Eames noted that Wyoming Department of Health (WDH) rules indicate there may be occasions for changing a person’s birth certificate sex designation after a sex change, but he said that “runs headfirst” into the law’s requirement that a birth certificate document “the facts of birth”
Wyoming enacted its set if laws dictating the gathering of vital statistics in 1973 and hasn’t changed it since.
Under the law, the WDH can craft rules to protect the integrity and accuracy of vital records.
One Wyoming Department of Health rule allows “any item” on a birth certificate to be changed with a court order. Another rule says that when a person’s sex has been changed a court order “shall” be required to amend the birth certificate.
In Eames’ reading, the rules use “amend” and “correct” interchangeably.
“The Legislature has clearly stated that the purpose of a birth certificate is to record ‘the facts of birth,’” wrote the judge. “One could then reasonably conclude that, under (the law about birth certificates), an amendment to a birth certificate is appropriate only if the birth certificate inaccurately states the ‘facts of birth.’”
This he drew from the portion of Wyoming law describing birth registration. That section of law calls the process a documentation of the facts of the birth.
“Amendment because a person identifies as ‘female,’ identifies as ‘male’ or has had a gender confirmation surgery runs headfirst into the Legislature’s mandate that a birth certificate record the ‘facts of birth,’” added Eames.
The vital records act would bar such a change though the WDH rules can be read to allow them, he wrote.
The What Is A Woman Act
The vital records laws were in place when the majority issued its ruling in the “MH” case, and the lower court in that case later ordered the department to issue the petitioner a different birth certificate.
Eames’ reliance on the 53-year-old law in denying KR’s petition marks a departure from both the high court’s majority opinion and the lower court’s resulting actions in the MH case.
But the Legislature also passed the What is a Woman Act five years after the MH ruling, and letting a court order change someone’s birth certificate sex designation “effectively bypasses the purpose” of that new law, wrote Eames.
“It is not a court’s role to decide what the law should be or to evaluate the wisdom of a statute or policy,” he wrote. “Instead, a court’s only responsibility is to interpret the law as it is written.”
Eames then upheld the What is a Woman Act as constitutional, saying it doesn’t discriminate by sex since males and females both have to keep their birth certificate designations under it.
He pointed to the recent U.S. Supreme Court case U.S. v Skrmetti.
Eames called KR’s assertion that the act infringes the right to privacy “misplaced,” and rejected KR’s claim that the act violates the Wyoming Constitution’s promise of health care autonomy for competent adults, saying KR failed to show how the act could interfere with health care access.
The Appeal
On appeal, KR dropped the argument that Wyoming’s health care autonomy right conflicts with the What is a Woman Act.
But the appeal brief filed March 13 keeps other constitutional arguments, calling the law discriminatory and a violation of the right to privacy.
It also disputes Eames’ ruling as “missing the forest for the trees” since Eames departed from the high court’s take on the 2020 MH case.
“Successful navigation of modern life requires proof of identity. From employment to housing, and health care to financial affairs, there are few facets of life where we are not called upon to prove our identities,” says the brief. “But when KR is called upon to do so, she cannot use her birth certificate … because the presentation of her birth certificate involuntarily discloses her transgender status and exposes her to an all-too-real risk of harassment, discrimination, and even violence.”
While the brief acknowledges Eames’ ruling and his partial reliance on the What is a Woman Act in denying KR’s petition, it also says the judge read the law incorrectly.
It “merely directs that the state collect and record data regarding assigned sex,” argues the brief.
Since the state keeps the original birth certificate even after issuing a corrected one, “that directive is fully satisfied,” the brief adds.
KR asserts other arguments against the law.
If the high court agrees with Eames that the law fits the situation and bars correcting sex designators to reflect gender identity, then KR would like the court to find the law unconstitutional.
“It violates the right to equal protection and informational privacy secured by the Wyoming Constitution, as other courts have recognized in similar contexts,” the brief says, pointing to historical harassment and mistreatment of transgender people and other metrics by which they may form a class of disadvantaged people.
While the case was still in Eames’ court, the AG’s office had said that while Wyoming’s judicial branch has found a right “to be let alone” in the common law backdrop of its tort cases, it hasn't found that in the field of constitutional rights.
Equality And Privacy
The What is a Woman Act, the brief argues, is discriminatory and “lacks a rational relationship to any government interest that could justify its application.”
The state had argued the new law bolsters historical accuracy and suggested it could help regulate sex-separated facilities and activities addressed in other areas of law.
But birth certificates can be changed in other contexts like letting a post-birth spouse replace an unknown birth parent, the brief says.
“Rather than exist as mere historical records, birth certificates also operate as contemporaneous identity documents that people use to fully participate in a society,” says the brief, adding, “There is no coherent explanation that the State can articulate of how providing (transgender people) with these amendments has harmed anyone else, or how it could do so.”
The brief hints at a belief that Wyoming’s other laws, banning male-to-female transgender people from women’s private spaces in public facilities and barring them cross-sex participation in single-sex public school sports, are not constitutional.
“Even if” the state can show these laws are constitutional, says the brief, “banning 100% of transgender people born in Wyoming from amending their birth certificates under any circumstances is not a rational means of achieving that goal.”
The brief then asserts that even if KR were a public school student seeking to participate in public school sports, the changed birth certificate “would not allow her to do so” since Wyoming could rely on the original copy held by the Wyoming Department of Health.
KR's brief also points to arguments Wyoming House of Representatives members had over whether the act would bar birth certificate changes. At least two of them believed it wouldn't, the brief indicates.
The bill's sponsor Rep. Jayme Lien, R-Casper, opposed an amendment to protect certificate changes with the words, "birth certificates are changeable. The (Wyoming) Supreme Court issued a ruling in 2020. Our Madame Chief Justice wrote in that brief, ‘the legislature could have only restricted the district court jurisdiction by specifically saying so.’”
Rep. Pepper Ottman, R-Riverton, added, “as we have just talked, the Supreme Court has decided that birth certificates can be changed, and there’s lots of reasons for that.”
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
