Non-binary for the first time: a ruling changes the law
A court in Oregon officially recognises a person as non-binary for the first time in the US, a precedent that sent a signal.
On 10 June 2016, Judge Amy Holmes Hehn of the Multnomah County Circuit Court in Oregon issued a ruling that was unprecedented in the United States: she officially recognised Jamie Shupe as non-binary, neither male nor female. With a single sentence in the ruling, a third gender was officially recognised for the first time in American legal history.
Shupe, 52 and an army veteran, had served in the US Army for 18 years before beginning to live as a woman in 2013. But this assignment did not reflect Shupe's reality either. In April 2016, Shupe filed a petition with the court together with lawyer Lake Perriguey. Perriguey later described the court appearance as "routine", without suspecting that it would make history. The Transgender Law Center described the ruling as the first decision of its kind in the United States. Lambda Legal later cited it as a precedent in a lawsuit seeking to win non-binary people access to a corresponding passport marker.
Shupe's story did not run in a straight line afterwards. In 2019, Shupe publicly declared a return to the male birth identity, a turn that was heavily exploited by conservative circles. In 2022, Shupe retracted this statement, reclaimed a trans identity and condemned how the story had been misused for anti-trans purposes. Shupe died in January 2025.
Regardless of Shupe's personal path, the ruling of 10 June 2016 is regarded as a legal milestone: it opened the way for the first time to legal recognition beyond the binary gender system, and in the following years it was followed by numerous similar decisions in US states.