After a transgender person seeking a birth certificate sex marker change from male to female challenged Wyoming’s What is a Woman Act as unconstitutional, the Wyoming Attorney General’s Office filed a brief Monday in its defense.
Enacted in 2025, the What is a Woman Act requires Wyoming agencies that collect sex-based data on people to do so according to each included person’s biological sex at birth.
A Natrona County resident whom the case caption calls “KR” challenged that law in 2025, and asked the Wyoming Department of Health (WDH) to issue a birth certificate change showing KR as female — two years after KR underwent gender-related surgery.
Natrona County District Court Judge Joshua Eames ruled last October that not only does the Department of Health not have to make that change, it cannot, under the wording of the new law.
Eames took his ruling a step further than the AG had requested at that time and ruled that the definition of birth certificates also bars such changes, since a birth certificate’s purpose in Wyoming is to record “the facts of birth.”
“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,’” wrote Eames.
“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,’” the ruling adds.
KR appealed the ruling to the Wyoming Supreme Court, arguing in late March that the What is a Woman Act deprives transgender people of equal treatment under the law and violates a right to privacy.
“Successful navigation of modern life requires proof of identity,” says KR’s March brief. "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.
"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.”
Then Came Monday
The Wyoming Attorney General’s Office defended the law in a Monday filing signed by Attorney General Keith Kautz, his Deputy AG Christina McCabe, and his Senior Assistant AGs JD Sater, Sam Williams and Jackson Engels.
The AG argues that Wyoming’s laws seek to protect the integrity and accuracy of vital records, the What is a Woman Act is clear and constitutional, and doesn’t invoke big constitutional court tests; the Wyoming Constitution doesn’t confer a right to privacy here; and KR has failed to show discrimination.
“Birth certificates contain important personal data and information necessary for the government to carry out public health functions,” says the AG’s Monday appeal brief.
KR had cast that particular government interest as disingenuous, since the Department of Health keeps original birth certificates even when their holders have obtained an amended copy.
It’s correct to say WDH does that, wrote the state’s attorneys, but allowing these changes would “create ambiguity for other officials who rely on the certificate for the public purposes listed in the Act.”
Also, gender identity can be fluid, so it’s not the same as, for example, a question of parentage that a court has resolved for the purpose of changing a birth certificate, the brief argues.
KR had argued that the What is a Woman Act is discriminatory, so should raise a court’s “intermediate scrutiny” — a test that makes it harder for a law to survive.
To trigger intermediate scrutiny, KR would have to show that the act creates classifications based on a person’s sex or transgender status that deserve a court’s protection, the state’s brief says.
“Instead, the Act affects ordinary interests,” which means the court should view it with more deference, the document adds.
Here the state emphasizes part of the law.
The What is a Woman Act says that state agencies collecting vital statistics data shall, when marking such data by sex, “identify each person who is part of the collected data set as either male or female consistent with the person’s sex at birth.”
So the class the law creates is one of “each person who is part of the collected data,” not a class of transgender people or non-transgender people, the state argues.
Here the AG invoked high-profile U.S. Supreme Court cases Bostock v. Georgia and United States v. Skrmetti.
In Bostock, the high court ruled that federal non-discrimination laws for employment defend sexual orientation and transgender status from discrimination, just as they defend people from discrimination based on sex.
In Skrmetti, however, the high court declined to expand that finding to the U.S. Constitution’s Equal Protection clause.
Either way, the state argues, KR couldn’t get a birth certificate sex-marker change regardless of whether KR were transgender or cisgender, which means the law doesn’t target transgender people specifically.
Into The Law Factory
KR's brief had pointed to arguments Wyoming House of Representatives members had over whether the act would bar birth certificate changes. At least two Wyoming lawmakers 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.”
That discussion contained “inaccurate information” the AG’s brief countered Monday, adding that it’s not proper for KR to rely on the statements of two lawmakers to poke holes in the law altogether.
“In general, ‘the subjective intent of a particular legislator is not appropriate’ evidence of legislative intent,” says the state’s brief, citing a 2011 Wyoming Supreme Court case.
Also, “discussion on an amendment that did not pass cannot reflect anything about the entire legislature’s intent with regard to the final enacted legislation,” says the brief.
KR’s Argument From Back In March
KR’s March brief had noted that birth certificates can be changed in other contexts, like letting a post-birth spouse replace an unknown birth parent.
“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 KR’s 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.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
