How Birth Certificates Are Being Weaponized Against Trans People

When Walter A. Plecker died in August 1947, his “death was considered a gift by many,” writes historian Arica L. Coleman in her searing history, That the Blood Stay Pure: African Americans, Native Americans, and the Predicament of Race and Identity in Virginia. “It marked the end of one of the most virulent, bureaucratic, and racist regimes in the history of [Virginia] and the nation.”

Six decades later, however, Plecker’s ghost still sometimes shows his face—most recently in litigation about the rights of transgender Americans.

Plecker was Virginia’s registrar of vital statistics from 1912 to 1946. He played a leading role in creating and enforcing the grotesque racial dictatorship called segregation, which ruled the South from the 1890s until 1964—and whose heritage still divides and degrades the region today.

When Plecker took office, the birth certificate was a relative novelty—a Progressive-era reform pushed in part as a eugenics measure to protect old-stock white America from nonwhites and immigrants. Plecker’s article, published in 1914, was one of the first to advocate for nationwide registration of a baby’s birthdate, age, sex, “legitimacy,” and race. It urged that the forms be worded simply enough to be understood by