(LifeSiteNews) – Gov. Albert Bryan Jr. of the U.S. Virgin Islands signed an executive order directing the territory’s agencies to allow individuals to change the gender markers on their identification documents, after months of failing to achieve the goal legislatively.
The order “directs executive branch agencies — including the Department of Health’s Office of Vital Statistics and the Bureau of Motor Vehicles — to amend gender designations on official documents upon request, ensuring that Virgin Islanders can obtain identification that accurately reflects their identity,” according to a press release, provided either a judicial order or medical documentation “confirming that the individual has an intersex condition and that a gender designation change is appropriate.”
“Virgin Islanders have reached out to our administration seeking a way to have their documents reflect who they truly are,” Bryan said. “This Executive Order provides a fair and compassionate process where none existed before. It ensures that our government recognizes and respects the lived realities of all our residents (…) Our administration remains committed to fairness, dignity, and respect for every Virgin Islander. This Executive Order brings the Virgin Islands in line with modern standards of inclusion and ensures that all residents have access to accurate and affirming government identification.”
JTV News reported that Bryan made the move after trying and failing to get such a change through the legislative process. In November 2024, the bill stalled before the Committee on Homeland Security, Justice and Public Safety amid fierce debate. “Assistant Health Commissioner Dr. Nicole Syms testified that aligning legal documents with an individual’s identity would reduce discrimination and improve access to health care,” the report recounts. “Senators Ray Fonseca, Alma Francis Heyliger and Kenneth Gittens, however, voiced concerns over the measure’s broader implications, including its impact on sports participation, public facilities and law enforcement databases.”
It is an article of progressive faith that gender is no more than a matter of self-perception that individuals are free to change at will. But according to modern biology, sex is not a subjective sense of self but an objective scientific reality, established by an individual’s chromosomes from their earliest moments of existence and reflected by hundreds of genetically based characteristics.
Yet for years LGBT activists have worked to promote “gender fluidity,” the idea that sexual identity is separate from biology and discernible only by personal perception, across public education, libraries, health care, and cultural traditions such as beauty contests, school homecomings, and athletic competitions.
Critics say their efforts have yielded a wide array of harms, both to the physical and mental health of gender-confused individuals themselves as well as to the rights, health, and safety of those who disagree, such as girls and women forced to share intimate facilities with males, female athletes forced to compete against biological males with natural physical advantages, and individuals forced to affirm false sexual identities in violation of their consciences, their understanding of scientific fact, and/or their religious beliefs.
President Donald Trump has issued executive orders to deny federal funds to medical and educational entities that promote gender ideology, which so far have gotten numerous major hospital systems to cease “transition” procedures on minors.
