Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) on Thursday announced that he signed a measure adding a “gender” field to state death certificates.
“The change will be in place by Jan. 1. Supporters say the law creates a space on forms to recognize an individual’s lived experience and aligns death certificates with other state records,” CPR News reported.
The legislation, called HB 25-1109, created three options for “gender” on death certificates, including male, female, and “nonbinary.” Under the bill, coroners, funeral directors, and anyone else who fills out death certificates will be required to list the “gender identity” of the deceased person, according to the report.
“People in Colorado deserve to be recognized in death as they lived their life,” one of the bill’s sponsors, Democrat state Rep. Kyle Brown, said during debate.
Death certificates will keep a separate category for “sex,” where the actual biological sex of the deceased person will be listed. Both Republicans and Democrats reportedly agree that recording someone’s actual sex is crucial information, “especially for medical researchers,” according to the report.
The report claims that sex on death certificates is often “at odds with gender identity” — the false idea that one can identify as or become a different sex than they were born as. The report cites a 2021 review of death records of 51 transgender and nonbinary-identifying people in Portland, Oregon, who were supposedly “misgendered.”
“California and New York allow people to be identified as nonbinary on death certificates, but most states don’t,” the report states.
“Republicans argued the legislation is a ‘deception’ and a violation of First Amendment rights. They also warned it could make Colorado a target of the Trump administration, which has insisted ‘there are only two genders’ and those are entirely determined by biological sex.”
Katherine Hamilton is a political reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on X @thekat_hamilton.
