Opinion | The law should protect transgender Minnesotans, not expose them

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I recently learned of a teenager in greater Minnesota who went to court for what was a pivotal milestone in the life of a young transgender person: legally changing her name to match her gender identity. It wasn’t meant to be a public event.

Yet after her filing, her old and new names circulated on social media. Strangers downloaded the court papers and found her family’s personal information, including her parents’ divorce records. Law enforcement ultimately sought an order to seal the file for her family’s safety. This was not an isolated incident.

Many transgender youth have been “outed” and bullied online and in real life after someone accessed their name-change filings. Their families’ safety was compromised and their privacy shattered all because of documents that don’t need to be searchable online.

Under current Minnesota court policy, when a transgender person seeks a name change or birth-record correction, the entire case is public. Every filing can be accessed, downloaded or shared by anyone, anywhere in the world. A courthouse visit is not required. It’s as simple as typing a name into the Minnesota Court Records Online search bar.

And those records don’t just show the person’s new name. They include their former name (often referred to as a “deadname”), home address, phone number, email address and, in many cases, the names of spouses, parents or children. For minors, both parents’ names appear in full.

Minnesota’s open-access rules were written for a paper world when the practical burden of driving to a courthouse, filling out a form and requesting a record created a natural buffer between transparency and privacy. In the digital age, those barriers are gone.

Today, a person in another state or another country can download a Minnesota court record and use it to identify and harass a private citizen. This is more than an intrusion. It’s an existential threat for transgender Minnesotans who already face disproportionate rates of harassment, discrimination and violence. Making their private court filings public only magnifies those risks.

The law should not force anyone to choose between living authentically and living safely. Yet that’s exactly the choice our current system imposes. Either you keep outdated identity documents that expose you to daily discrimination, or you correct them through the courts and risk harassment, job loss or worse. No one should have to pick between one constitutional right and another.

That’s why a coalition of legal advocates, including the Minnesota State Bar Association and my friends at Gender Justice and OutFront Minnesota, has petitioned the Minnesota Supreme Court to fix this problem.

The proposed change to Rule 4 of Minnesota’s public-access court rules would make name-change and gender-marker correction files nonpublic by default, just like juvenile records, adoption cases or sexual-assault filings. Law enforcement and relevant government agencies would still have access; the change would simply close the public search function.

Our federal and state constitutions both recognize that some personal information deserves protection, especially in an era of massive digital databanks. Courts have long held that when the government collects sensitive information, it carries a duty to prevent “unwarranted disclosures.”

The Minnesota Constitution goes further still. It has been interpreted to offer stronger privacy protections than federal law, especially for individuals “on the periphery of society.” That includes the right to maintain a private persona and the freedom to decide, as the Minnesota Supreme Court has said, “which parts of our lives shall become public and which parts we shall hold close.”

For transgender Minnesotans, the need to hold certain information close is a matter of personal safety. As the petition documents, online harassment of transgender people has become disturbingly common. Doxing, which is the nonconsensual disclosure of private information, often leads to intimidation, death threats and violence. Keeping name-change records public doesn’t advance transparency; it invites harm.

The proposed rule change would not cost taxpayers money. It would not shield crimes or court decisions from scrutiny. It would not prevent journalists from holding the government accountable. It would simply protect vulnerable Minnesotans from being outed or endangered because they followed the law. If adopted, Minnesota would join New York, California, Oregon and other states that already restrict public access to these sensitive records while preserving judicial transparency in all other respects.

At a time when the transgender and gender-nonconforming community is being targeted, the Minnesota Supreme Court has the opportunity to say that openness and compassion can coexist. The petition before the Court doesn’t just serve the transgender community; it serves the principle that every Minnesotan deserves safety, dignity and agency over their own life story. Because no one should have to risk their safety to be themselves.