“To hold that piece of paper brought tears to my eyes.”

That is how my friend and former ACLU of Michigan colleague Amy Hunter says it felt to finally obtain a birth certificate showing her true gender. A trans woman, Amy was forced to live most of her life with an essential document that didn’t reflect who she really is.

“For as far back as I can remember I’ve always known myself to be Amy,” she says. “But the name William and the male gender marker were on my birth certificate.”

Not anymore.

That’s because the director of the state’s Department of Health and Human Services requested an opinion from Attorney General Dana Nessel regarding the constitutionality of requiring transgender people to undergo gender reassignment surgery before their birth certificate could be changed.

When that request was made, we sent the attorney general a letter, signed by nearly every LGBTQ+ organization in the state, arguing that the surgery requirement is unconstitutional because it singles out transgender people for discriminatory treatment — requiring only them to undergo a physically invasive surgical procedure to obtain an accurate birth certificate. Nessel agreed and issued an opinion that the surgery requirement is unconstitutional based on equal protection and due process grounds.

This is a significant step forward because many people who want it can’t afford gender reassignment surgery, which is very expensive and usually not covered by insurance. There are also trans people who don’t feel it is necessary, or simply, for whatever reason, don’t want to go through it.

Now, thankfully, that’s no longer an issue. Because of Nessel’s opinion, the Michigan Department of Vital Records no longer requires proof of surgery to change the gender marker on a birth certificate. The department has issued a new form where a transgender person can self-attest as to their gender with three options to choose from: male, female, and gender non-binary. That means many more transgender people born in Michigan are going to be able to obtain accurate birth certificates, which is pivotal to being able to live their authentic lives in accordance with their gender identity.

“This change is so important because a birth certificate is the base of the pyramid for all of our legal identity documents,” says Hunter. “It forms the basis of so many things.”

She is right about that. Government-issued forms of ID that rely on the information contained in birth certificates are a prime example. Giving a driver’s license when carded at a bar or being pulled over for a traffic violation can become, at the very least, an extremely stressful situation for trans people.

Just as important is the psychological impact.

“Getting my new birth certificate, and seeing that the legal documents going all the way back to my birth finally matched who I always knew myself to be, was a huge emotional moment for me,” explains Hunter. “Without it, a piece of the puzzle was missing. And to have that last piece finally put in place was an incredible feeling. There’s no longer a missing piece.”

But she’s not just happy for herself.

“It brings me great joy to know that everyone in Michigan can now experience that same sense of joy in holding a birth certificate that reflects who they really are without having to first go through surgery,” she says.

This victory was a long time coming. Now that it has been achieved, we should take a moment to celebrate it.

Keyon Harrison, an African American 16-year-old, was doing nothing wrong as he walked home from school on a spring day in Grand Rapids. But a police officer thought he looked “suspicious” — so the officer stopped Harrison, questioned, searched him and took his photograph and fingerprints.

Harrison was never arrested or charged with any crime. But his photograph and fingerprints now sit in a government database, along with thousands of others that Grand Rapids police have collected over the years under similar circumstances.

This is wrong. It’s also unconstitutional.

The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution protects us from “unreasonable searches and seizures.” It places the onus on the government to show that people have done something wrong — not on members of the public to prove that we are doing something right.

That is why attorneys from the ACLU are representing Harrison and another Black teen, Denishio Johnson, in a Michigan Supreme Court case challenging the Grand Rapids Police Department’s “photograph and print” policy. The Mackinac Center for Public Policy, in a brief co-authored by the Cato Institute, filed a brief supporting the effort.

The court should declare the “photograph and print” policy unconstitutional for reasons conservatives, liberals and everyone in between can get behind. Fingerprinting is a “search” under the Fourth Amendment because it involves the physical intrusion onto someone’s body in order to obtain personal information, and because it violates our reasonable expectation of privacy by collecting unique biometric identifiers.

And when police take someone’s fingerprints just because they think that the person looks suspicious, the search is “unreasonable” because it does not fall within a recognized exception to the Fourth Amendment’s bedrock requirement that police obtain a warrant.

From a historical perspective, too, it is very likely that forced fingerprinting, without a court’s approval, would have been considered an unreasonable search or seizure at the time the Fourth Amendment was enshrined in our Constitution. Backers of this practice, therefore, do not have the original meaning of the Fourth Amendment on their side.

Further, the “photograph and print” policy encourages racial profiling, undermining community trust. Stop-and-frisk tactics by police departments are notorious for their racial disparities and have been held unconstitutional by federal courts.

Early in this case, a review of several hundred incident reports found that 75% of the people stopped by the police and subjected to the “photograph and print” policy were Black, while just 15% were White. The overall racial makeup of Grand Rapids, by contrast, is 21% Black and 65% White.

Meanwhile, we should all be alarmed by the privacy implications of policies that allow the police, just by deeming someone suspicious, to deploy advanced technology that will collect and analyze highly sensitive biometric information and store it in a law enforcement database indefinitely. This case is about fingerprints, but soon we may be confronting iris scanners or even DNA harvesting.

Police have a tough job. But the first part of that job is respecting the constitutional rights of the people they serve. The Michigan Supreme Court should reaffirm these Fourth Amendment protections.

Dan Korobkin is the legal director of the ACLU of Michigan. Jarrett Skorup is the director of marketing and communications at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

Read the full story in The Detroit News.