## Facts

- A transgender woman, registered male at birth, underwent medical treatment and sex-reassignment surgery and lived socially as a woman.
- In 2005, she filed an ordinary civil action in Mexico City family court seeking rectification of her birth certificate to change (1) her name and (2) the sex marker from male to female to match her social and legal reality.
- She also requested, as a privacy measure, issuance of a new birth certificate that would not disclose her prior name/sex or the basis for the changes.
- The family-court judge granted the name and sex-marker rectification but ordered the changes recorded by marginal note on the existing certificate and denied issuance of a new certificate, relying on a civil-code provision that contemplated rectification by marginal annotation.
- On appeal, the First Family Chamber affirmed, including the marginal-note method and the refusal to issue a new certificate.
- She sought direct constitutional relief, arguing that the marginal notation would repeatedly and involuntarily disclose highly sensitive information, causing stigma and exposing her to discrimination, in violation of constitutional protections of privacy, dignity, equality, and related rights.

## Issues

1. Whether applying the civil-code rule requiring rectification of birth records by marginal note, rather than issuing a new certificate, was unconstitutional as applied to a transgender person who had transitioned.
2. Whether a marginal notation that effectively discloses a person’s transgender status violates constitutional rights to privacy, dignity, equality, and non-discrimination.
3. Whether constitutional interpretation required a remedy that prevents public disclosure of prior sex and name in civil-status documentation.

## Decision

- The Supreme Court granted constitutional relief and set aside the challenged lower-court judgments.
- The Court held that requiring rectification only through a marginal note, and refusing a more protective form of documentation, was unconstitutional in this context.
- The Court required proceedings and relief consistent with protecting the complainant’s fundamental rights, understood to include issuance of a birth certificate reflecting her corrected name and female sex marker without a visible notation disclosing her transgender history.

## Legal Principles

- Civil-status registry rules must be applied in a rights-consistent manner; mechanical application is impermissible when it causes unconstitutional injury.
- Constitutional privacy protects against compelled public disclosure of highly sensitive personal data in identity documents when disclosure is not necessary to achieve legitimate registry aims.
- Government action that predictably exposes a transgender person to stigma and discrimination can violate constitutional guarantees of dignity, equality, and non-discrimination.
- When legal certainty and traceability can be preserved through less intrusive internal registry measures, public-facing documentation should not be structured to reveal a person’s transgender status.

## Conclusion

The Supreme Court held that recording a transgender woman’s corrected name and sex by a marginal note on the birth certificate, coupled with denial of a new certificate, unconstitutionally impaired privacy and equality; it granted relief requiring a documentation remedy that prevents routine public disclosure of her transgender status.


In re Direct Civil Amparo 6/2008 (Sup. Ct. Mex. 2009)