Gender Recognition Act (California Senate Bill 179)

California's Gender Recognition Act (Senate Bill 179) was signed into law on October 15, 2017. This bill made it significantly easier for transgender and/or nonbinary people to get their legal gender to match their gender identity, by removing the requirement for any form of medical transition.

Part of the text of the bill reads:

"The binary gender designations of female and male fail to adequately represent the diversity of human experience. Nonbinary is an umbrella term for people with gender identities that fall somewhere outside of the traditional conceptions of strictly either female or male. People with nonbinary gender identities may or may not identify as transgender, may or may not have been born with intersex traits, may or may not use gender-neutral pronouns, and may or may not use more specific terms to describe their genders, such as agender, genderqueer, gender fluid, Two Spirit, bigender, pangender, gender nonconforming, or gender variant."

The GRA does not affect the process for changing gender markers on documents issued by the federal government, or documents issued by other US states.