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Amid today’s legislative avalanche, the D.C. Council gave its final approval to a bill that protects the identities of transgender residents who undergo gender transitions. The Council included in its consent agenda the second reading of the JaParker Deoni Jones Birth Certificate Equality Amendment Act, a bill that activists have sought in order to make the District a bit safer for transgender people.

Pending a signature by Mayor Vince Gray, who has said he supports the bill, D.C. law requires people who have their names legally changed to publish notices in a local newspaper once a week for three weeks after the procedure. But for transgender people, posting such a public notice can lead to an inadvertent outing.

The bill allows transgender people to forgo that step. Instead, people who go through gender reassignments would have their original birth certificates sealed and be issued new birth certificates with the proper gender marker with the sealed affidavit of a medical professional. The bill includes people who switch genders with or without surgery; currently, only people who undergo expensive sexual reassignment procedures are eligible to have the gender markers on their birth certificates switched.

Andy Bowen, a social policy organizer at the DC Trans Coalition who helped get the bill passed, said that between the measure’s committee review and its first full Council vote on June 29, the bill was improved by allowing any medical professional—not just physicians—to sign off on changing gender markers. The bill was also amended to explicitly include intersex individuals.

Bowen says that when the bill is signed, it will be the strongest in the United States. Twenty-three states and the federal government protect transgender identities.

The bill was named for Deoni Jones, a transgender woman who was killed in February 2012 near a Metro bus stop in Northeast D.C.