What’s Current: New Zealand passes legislation making it easier to change the sex on birth certificates

  • New Zealand enacts a law that makes it easier to change the sex recorded on birth certificates. Applicants are no longer required to show proof of any sex reassignment procedures to amend their documented sex.
  • Saudi women’s rights activist, Loujain al-Hathloul, files a lawsuit against three former U.S. intelligence officers who admitted to hacking her cellphone on behalf of the United Arab Emirates.
  • The Canadian Senate passes Bill C-4 (previously Bill C-6), which purports to ban “conversion therapy,” but conflates “gender identity” with sexual orientation, criminalizing therapists who don’t take an “affirmative” approach to youth claiming to be transgender.
  • A Texas judge has ruled that a law banning abortions after approximately six weeks violates the state’s constitution because it allows private citizens to sue abortion providers. Reuters reports:

“The law was designed to avoid normal means of legal challenge, because rather than making state officials responsible for enforcement, it instead gave private individuals anywhere the right to sue doctors and others who provide abortions after six weeks in Texas.”