SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California will seal records of transgender adults who change their names and gender markers on official documents and limit data sharing with federal agencies after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a handful of bills shoring up protections for transgender and nonbinary people as the White House has targeted the community for attack.

Under a 2023 state law, California courts seal records for minors under 18 years of age who change their name and gender identifier to protect their privacy. In January, Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, proposed extending those protections to adults via Senate Bill 59, citing an increase in transphobic attacks and the incoming Trump administration’s antipathy towards the trans community.

Newsom signed three other bills from Wiener and fellow Democratic legislators Rick Chavez Zbur and Chris Ward that expand confidentiality for trans people receiving gender-affirming health care and streamline bureaucratic processes for trans adults and children to change their gender markers and names on official documents.

Ward, Zbur, and Wiener are members of the Legislative LGBTQ Caucus. Newsom signed their bills on Monday evening, hours before a deadline requiring him to sign or veto legislation elapsed.

Immediately after taking office in January, President Donald Trump stripped federal anti-discrimination protections for trans and nonbinary people and banned federal agencies from acknowledging their existence. In June, the Department of Justice sued California for not repealing a decade-old anti-discrimination law protecting transgender students and subpoenaed medical providers for lists of youth patients receiving gender affirming care. Congress also curtailed trans adults’ health care if they use Medicaid in states like Texas, Florida, Ohio and Arizona.

California Republicans’ attempts to enact similar policy, like banning trans girls from playing school sports, have failed to pass the Legislature’s Democratic supermajority.

SB 59 protects trans adults from further harassment or employment discrimination by sealing any previous records that reference their previous legal name and assigned sex at birth. The bill applies to all name and marker change request received starting July 1, 2026, and allows people to sue anyone who posts their gender identity and name change records online. Another Wiener bill Newsom signed, SB 497, prevents other states from subpoenaing California medical records that could be accessed by the federal government, expanding upon Wiener’s 2022 “transgender state of refuge” law.

“The Trump Administration is trying to make transgender people the scapegoats for their fascist takeover. Today, California stood up to protect them,” Wiener said in a statement. “President Trump has made it clear he is willing to violate laws and norms to target transgender people, and that he will not stop until their existence has been erased from public life. These laws strengthen legal and privacy protections to stop MAGA from targeting the transgender community.”

Hazel Williams, a San Francisco organizer who pushed Wiener to introduce SB 59, welcomed the bill’s passage but decried a lookback provision lawmakers stripped out that would have automatically sealed all past name and gender marker changes. Legislators said they were concerned about costs, and that people can still apply to retroactively seal their name and gender marker changes.

“SB 59 will help trans folks maintain some basic dignity, privacy and safety in this increasingly hostile environment. It will protect countless people from doxing, harassment and worse,” Williams said. “It’s an important step towards protecting trans people from violence, but it’s far from enough. ... I’m particularly concerned about the ability of poor and underresourced communities to benefit from this law with its limitations on retroactivity. ... Education, outreach, and resource allocation will be key, but all of those areas are underfunded and the state is not exactly chomping at at the bit to change that.”

Newsom’s LGBTQ record under scrutiny

Newsom signed Zbur’s Assembly Bill 1084, which streamlines the process for transgender adults and children to request gender marker and names changes. He also signed Ward’s Assembly Bill 82, which expands protections for reproductive care providers to include gender-affirming care by limiting data about prescription drugs like testosterone and mifepristone from being stored in databases that are accessible to other states.

He vetoed Sen. Caroline Menjivar’s Senate Bill 418, which would have allowed pharmacists to dispense a year supply of hormone therapy for gender-affirming and menopause reasons and required medical providers to cover treatment. In a veto message, he said the elimination of utilization management, a tool to management care, would have increased costs under SB 418.

Menjivar’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The governor has been under scrutiny since March, when he told the late MAGA pundit Charlie Kirk that allowing trans athletes to compete with cis athletes was “unfair.” He doubled down in a recent interview with video game streamer ConnorEatsPants, saying his “struggle” with trans athletes was a minor footnote in his overall record on LGBTQ rights.

On Monday, he signed Assembly Bill 749 from Assemblymember Tina McKinnor, D-Englewood, dubbed the “Youth Sports For All Act,” which will study inequalities in youth sports regardless of barriers like age, sex, location, income, and gender identity. His support is likely to rankle Republicans like Senate Minority Leader Brian Jones, who asked the governor last month to veto it because he said it would “broadly support biological males competing against biological females in sport.”

In his interview with ConnorEatsPants, Newsom noted his godson, oil heir Nats Getty, is trans, and called himself a “champion” of LGBTQ rights: “It hurts me, it’s not just offensive, as a guy who’s literally put my political life on the line for the community, for decades, has been a champion and a leader, that people think somehow I’ve sold the community out, because on this issue (of trans sports participation), I disagree.”

“I think that highlighting that as if it’s something that is genuinely affecting a lot of people is, in and of itself, hurting the trans community,” ConnorEatsPants said in response, referring to the minuscule number of trans athletes competing at the college level.

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