A new California law will ensure transgender people are represented according to their wishes on their death certificates.
The law takes effect Wednesday. It allows the death certificate to reflect the gender the deceased identified with rather than strictly their biological sex.
Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins wrote the bill. She says while the LGBT community has made advances, there is still work to do.
"I want to remember as far as we’ve come, we got a ways to go to support some communities that are really marginalized and don’t have equal rights," she says.
The law allows written instructions from the deceased or updated documents like a driver license or birth certificate to serve as proof of gender identity. If that evidence does not exist the next of kin can specify the appropriate gender.
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