NEW YORK — He had been through sex-change surgery and wanted his birth certificate to reflect the man he’d become, at nearly 70.

City health officials said they needed a psychiatric report and detailed surgical records to switch the gender on his birth certificate — requirements that put up undue roadblocks, a judge recently ruled in a case that highlights legal questions around a sensitive issue of identity.

The ruling, made public last week , orders the city Health Department to re-evaluate his request and questions the agency’s understanding of “the lives and experience of transgender people.” It marks something of a victory for advocates seeking to make it easier for people who have changed gender to change their identity documents.

“I hope that the Department of Health will really take this to heart and really see that the court is, in this decision, recognizing the importance of respecting the identities of transgender individuals,” said Erica Kagan, a lawyer for the man, Louis Birney, who declined to be interviewed.

Updating identity documents has become a growing concern for transgender people as government-issued IDs are increasingly needed and scrutinized, whether to get a job or board a plane. Some transgender people have ended up with one sex listed on a driver’s license and another on a birth certificate, for instance, because of a patchwork of agencies and rules.

After having sex-change surgery in his late 60s in 2009, Birney applied to change his birth certificate. He enclosed a doctor’s letter saying the operation had been completed successfully.

The Health Department called for more details on the “reconstruction procedure,” plus a psychiatric evaluation and a physician’s record of a post-operative examination.

City officials have said they need robust proof of a permanent sex change to make sure there are safeguards on changing a crucial identity record, one used to obtain important items ranging from passports to government benefits.

Birney said the requests invaded his privacy and he’d already provided enough information to satisfy a city regulation requiring proof of the surgery — a demand that is itself a focus of criticism from transgender advocates.

In ruling on Birney’s lawsuit, Manhattan state Supreme Court Justice Paul G. Feinman’s ruling declined to address whether the surgery requirement was justified.

But he faulted the Health Department for not providing “a clear, straightforward list” of requirements for changing a birth certificate. And he suggested that calling for psychological records amounted to overreaching for information and underappreciating what it takes to change genders.

“It does not seem very likely that an individual would go through all the years of required preparation for surgical transition, including psychotherapy, undergo major surgery, assume life under his or her new gender, and then decide it was all a mistake and change back,” Feinman wrote. “This apparent assumption tends to suggest a certain ignorance by the department of the lengthy transition process and the lives and experience of transgender people.”

City lawyers are considering what to do next.

“We appreciate the judge’s detailed…

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JAKARTA, Indonesia – Barack Obama’s former nanny, Evie, is overwhelmed by her jolt from transgender slum-dweller to local celebrity. TV crews troop in and out of her tiny concrete hovel. Estranged relatives finally want to meet. She even has a promising job offer.

Evie, who was born male but considers herself a woman, decided after enduring years of abuse and ridicule she’d be better off trying to just fit in. She stopped cross-dressing and has since eked out a living hand-washing clothes.

But since being the subject of a recent article by The Associated Press about the struggles of transgender people in this predominantly Muslim nation, the 66-year-old has been showered with attention. It’s mostly because of her long-ago connection to the now-U.S. president – though she hopes it might generate more openness on gender issues.

“After living without hope for so long, like I was locked in a dark room, I now feel like the door is open,” said Evie, who like many Indonesians goes by one name. “It’s like the winds of heaven are blowing hope for me.”

“Even my relatives who never cared about me are now coming to see me.”
Though many newcomers to Indonesia are surprised by the quasi-acceptance and pervasiveness of transgenders – seen on TV, working in salons – they are usually the object of scorn.

“I realize this won’t last long,” she said. “But I think my story might help open people’s eyes so they will respect us more.”

An American teacher at Saint Peter’s Catholic School in Jakarta, Philip Myers, was so touched by Evie’s story when he saw it earlier this week that he offered her a job as a cook and a maid.

“I really don’t care if she wants to come in wearing a dress, or pants. The outward appearance is not the issue. Her heart is what’s important,” Myers said.

Evie was excited by the idea. But for now, she’s too overwhelmed to think about it. During a break between TV interviews at her home in a tightly packed Jakarta slum on Thursday, piled high with dirty laundry she’s collected from neighbors, she said she hoped he would be patient.

She also said she would love to hear from her former charge – but there has been no outreach yet from the White House. Evie started caring for 8-year-old “Barry” Obama in 1969 when he lived in Indonesia’s capital with his mother, Ann Dunham, who had arrived in the country two years earlier after marrying her second husband, Indonesian Lolo Soetoro.

Evie played with the Obama and picked him up from school. She worked in the home as a man and says she never let young Barry see her in women’s clothes, though neighbors remember seeing her leave the home in the evening dressed in drag.

The TV crews have been primarily interested in that brief period, Evie said, before Obama’s family left Indonesia in the early 1970s and before she resorted to prostitution when work as household help dried up.

In the years that followed, she and her friends faced regular beatings from security guards and soldiers. They were often rounded them up, loaded into trucks, and taken to a field where they were kicked, hit and otherwise abused.

When one day, nearly 20 years ago now, she saw the body of one of her friends in a sewage canal, her beautiful face bashed in, she decided enough was enough.

She gave away all of her dresses, colorful pants and bras: She was ready to live as a man. She kept to a quiet existence on the margins of the Indonesian capital, where neighbors have been flabbergasted by all of this week’s fuss.

“They came with TV cameras and interview her as though she is a star,” said Ayi Hasanah, a 50-year-old housewife who lives nearby. “Hopefully this can change her life. Because as far as I can see, her life is very hard.”