Of course, it wasn’t always that way. In 2007, the Oklahoma State Department of Health (ODH), then under the state’s last Democratic governor, Brad Henry, started allowing trans people to update their birth certificates if they were able to obtain a court order confirming their identities. Even as the state’s Supreme Court acknowledged last week, the policy “was largely non-adversarial and persisted with little notoriety,” and as per Transitics’ prior research, it brought Oklahoma in line with the other 44 states that allowed these changes. As early as 2018, the ODH included instructions for legal gender changes on its website, where it stressed that it “does not require a physician’s statement.” Although the website was redesigned after the current governor, Kevin Stitt, took office in 2019, those instructions remained on the page well past that point.