A three-judge Indiana Court of Appeals panel heard arguments Tuesday on whether the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles must issue driver’s licenses with an “X” gender designation for nonbinary Hoosiers.
The BMV started issuing the X licenses in 2019 under an administrative rule. The next year, then-Attorney General Curtis Hill released an advisory opinion saying the agency didn’t have the authority to do so.
The BMV then halted the practice and 13 nonbinary Hoosiers sued. A Monroe County trial judge ruled against the agency, forcing it to reinstate its prior policy of issuing driver’s licenses with an X.
Attorney General Todd Rokita’s office then appealed the case to the Indiana Court of Appeals.
Solicitor General James Barta argued on behalf of the state Tuesday that “gender refers to the biological trait of being male or female, not an inner sense of falling into a specific category or none at all.”
He said the state statute requires the BMV to list gender, meaning they can’t leave it blank or unspecified. And Barta noted that in 2007 — when the statute was last updated — gender was commonly known to be male or female.
Jon Laramore represented the plaintiffs as executive director of Indiana Legal Services Inc.
He quickly addressed “this notion that what we’re talking about here is someone’s inner sense of their gender. That’s not right. What we’re talking about here is whether my clients can go to the BMV with one of the two kinds of proof that the BMV’s own regulation requires and get their gender changed to X. Because they have either a birth certificate that says X, or they have one of these forms.”
He noted the form is signed by a physician.
Laramore also said you can go now and get it under the trial court decision and “the world continues to evolve.”
And he argued an attorney general’s opinion in non-binding.
Both sides cited various definitions of gender and sex and how they have changed over the years.
“So, we have dueling dictionaries out there,” one judge asked.
The panel will rule in the coming weeks or months.
By Niki Kelly – The Indiana Capital Chronicle is an independent, not-for-profit news organization that covers state government, policy and elections.
