Whenever I read a gender-bender brief, I get a stabbing pain in my frontal lobe.
I think that that’s part of the plan: Disorient potential dissenters so much that they are forced to give up and put a cold compress on their foreheads. So, when Kayla Roylance petitioned the Wyoming Supreme Court to change his birth certificate, I went looking for the Extra-Strength Tylenol.
Thankfully, Attorney General, Keith Kautz, filed an excellent reply last Monday (May 11, 2026). In that brief, he answered K.R.’s challenges to Wyoming’s “What is a Woman Act.” I would recommend reading it, but I know that if I do that too often, your eyes will glaze over.
So, this column will not address the fine legal points. Kautz has already done that better than I could ever do. Instead, I want to explore a simpler and more basic question: Why do governments issue certificates at all?
Governments issue and recognize all sorts of certificates from birth certificates and marriage certificates to certificates of public accounting (CPA) and certificates of kindergarten graduation. What’s the point?
A certificate is a document that certifies something. The American Heritage Dictionary defines “certify” as “to confirm formally as true, accurate, or genuine.” Government certificates are public and official recognition of realities - truths.
The word is made from two Latin roots: “certus” meaning “fixed or sure” and “facere” meaning “to make or do.” Government certificates do not create the realities that they certify. Rather, they are filed to document the truth of what already exists as fixed and sure.
But why should governments write certificates at all? If the truth is already true before it is certified, wouldn’t the truth still be the truth even if the government never addressed the topic? After all, the sky is still blue. Yet the State of Wyoming has never bothered to certify that fact.
That’s because state-issued certificates are about pre-existing truths that the state has an interest in protecting. Marriage is protected by the state. For that reason, the state needs to know who is married to whom.
Likewise, states have a duty to protect your life. And states that refuse to recognize your life will also refuse to protect it.
That’s why the Temporary Restraining Order against the Heartbeat Bill is so troubling. Wyoming’s people, their legislators, and the governor, all recognize lives that need protection before they are born. But a solitary Casper judge won’t let them do it. That doesn’t make those people go away. It only makes them invisible to the law. But I digress.
Birth certificates are not needed to tell the government who is alive and who is not. A heartbeat can accomplish that. Birth certificates are needed, however, to document date of birth, sex, and parentage. Because the government must treat different people differently based on these factors, just governments should have certain knowledge of these facts.
Parentage should be certified so that the government can protect the parental rights of the unique father and mother against all other usurpers who may harm the child by an illegitimate claim to parental rights.
Birthdays should be certified so that the government can protect minor children from adult abusers who would sell them alcohol and tobacco. Birthdays tell the government when a child is eligible to start school, to go hunting, to drive a car, or to get married.
Sex should be certified so that the government can protect girls from boys who would barge into their locker rooms or break their bones on an athletic field. Sex is also needed for the government to protect both men and women from medical malpractice. A drug or procedure that may be helpful for one sex could be harmful to the other.
The lawsuit of K.R. against the State of Wyoming is not about any of that. It is about forcing the state to lie. A person who was indisputably a male went to Thailand to have plastic surgery. The doctor then sent him home with a letter “stating that the Appellant changed gender from male to female.”
Is that true? That’s the real question. Because certifying it does not make it true. It should be certified only if it is already true.
Anyone or anything that “certifies” things that are not true does not change reality. Instead, they document that they are out of touch with reality. They do not make new truths. They make themselves unreliable witnesses to the truth. In short, governments that certify lies delegitimize themselves.
I thank A.G. Kautz for going down the Rabbit Hole to answer the mind-bending arguments against the What is a Woman Act. I am truly sorry for any migraines that he or his office suffered as a result. But I am profoundly grateful that he faithfully defended the legitimacy of the Cowboy State.
Jonathan Lange is a Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod pastor in Evanston and Kemmerer and serves the Wyoming Pastors Network. Follow his blog at https://jonathanlange.substack.com/. Email: JLange64@protonmail.com
