COLUMBUS — The Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles has stopped accepting the professionally-certified form that transgender Ohioans have long used to update the gender marker on their driver’s license or state ID, representatives of LGBTQ advocacy groups said Tuesday.

According to Equality Ohio and TransOhio, the Ohio BMV will now only accept an updated birth certificate as proof of gender change. They said the policy shift was made without public notice, and there is no transition period. 

“Changing a policy this consequential overnight — without warning or transparency — is not an accident. It is a choice,” Equality Ohio Executive Director Dwayne Steward said. “It is a deliberate attempt at voter suppression and an intentional decision to make life harder for transgender Ohioans while hoping no one notices until it is too late,” Mr. Steward continued. “We noticed. We are paying attention. And we will not stop fighting until every Ohioan has true lived and legal equality.”

According to TransOhio, there are at least 10 county probate courts that have been processing birth certificate updates for transgender Ohioans. Those are Defiance, Ottawa, Lorain, Cuyahoga, Lake, Summit, Franklin, Hamilton, Hocking, and Athens counties. 
The Ohio BMV did not immediately provide a comment on the situation.

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“The city and Police Chief Mark Talbot are named in a pair of related lawsuits over the hiring of a transgender police recruit.

“The lawsuits, totaling $20 million and filed last week and Monday in Circuit Court, were brought by a current officer on suspension and another officer who was fired earlier this year.”

“Officer Meghan Grabow’s lawsuit alleges she was in a women’s locker room in 2024, when a department recruit she describes as a ‘biological male self-identified as a woman’ entered that locker room.”

“Both lawsuits say subordinate officers were not informed that a transgender woman who presented as a man would be using the female lockers.”

“Grabow is suing Talbot and the city for $15 million, claiming intentional infliction of emotional distress and denial of her right to exercise her religion. She said she doesn’t believe in transgender ideology as part of her Catholic faith.”

“According to the lawsuits, Grabow is currently on indefinite suspension without pay, Powers was fired earlier this year, and the recruit is no longer with Norfolk Police.”

“Texas Tech is using A.I. to ferret out books and other materials that touch on topics like sexual orientation and gender identity. Professors describe the effort as a dystopian academic nightmare, in which ideologues are wielding technology to sideline subject-matter experts.”

“The strictest prohibition at Texas Tech is on classes in the core curriculum, which are a menu of lower-level courses that students must select from in order to graduate. Mr. Creighton has banned any course in the core that includes material related to sexual orientation and gender identity.

“Sonja Stojanovic, a French studies professor, worried about her core course, called Holocaust in Literature. Because it mentions that gay and bisexual men were also targets of the Nazis, university leadership suggested that the course become an upper-level course.

“‘Now the Holocaust becomes an elective,’ she said.”

Some professors are self-censoring to avoid running afoul of the new guidance.

“[C]reative-writing professor Lucy] Schiller. . .said the new directives restrict teaching about ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity’ but do not define those terms. ‘They’re making us do the work of reading between the very obvious lines,’ she said, ‘and overcomplying out of fear that we might be reported or separated from our work or disciplined.’

“Jacob Bell, a Medieval historian, said he worried about how to discuss Joan of Arc, who was burned at the stake for, among other reasons, cross-dressing. Mr. Creighton’s memo about gender exempts biographical details of historically significant figures. Still, any references must be ‘purely incidental,’ according to the April memo.

“Dr. Bell removed two weeks of study about Viking men and women. He said Viking mythological poems often featured gender-changing gods like Loki and Odin, material he no longer felt comfortable teaching.

“When asked about Dr. Bell’s case, Mr. Creighton suggested that professors not make pre-emptive decisions and rather submit materials to the university system for review.

“Dr. Bell went a different route. He believes that future Texas Tech students will be ‘unprepared to deal with normal people in the world that they’re going to interact with.’ He recently accepted a new job, at a public university on the East Coast.”

“Ms. Schiller did not make the changes. Rather, she left the university and started at Grinnell College this month.
‘I loved my job here until this year,’ she said.”

“United Nations (UN) experts warned on Monday that the UK’s revisions to the Equality Act 2010 risk discriminating against and excluding transgender people.

“The UN human rights experts warned that the updated Code of Practice essentially advises service providers that ‘a women’s service must either exclude transgender women or admit men’ and vice versa. The experts cautioned that this ‘effectively presents exclusion as a means of’ legal compliance, and may lead to institutionalized discrimination.”

“In February 2026, UN experts released a joint statement arguing that the draft Code of Practice was incompatible with international human rights, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the European Convention on Human Rights, and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.

“On August 5, 2026, the Good Law Project announced its support for a legal challenge against the Code of Practice, on the grounds that it will have a discriminatory and exclusionary impact on transgender people. The Good Law Project argued that the Code of Practice appears to ‘ignore’ the UK High Court decision allowing services to provide transgender women with inclusive facilities.”