SANTA CRUZ >> As Kelly Keenan stood before Santa Cruz County Superior Court Judge Robert Atack on Sept. 26, the judge held the first legal document in California history — and only the second in U.S. history — with a third gender option checked. Atack officially had granted Keenan a gender change from female to “nonbinary.”

For the estimated 150,000 Americans who do not identify as either male or female, Keenan’s legal gender change is seen as a civil rights victory.

“It’s very hurtful to have your government and society say you don’t exist,” Keenan said. “People deserve to pursue their civil right to an accurate gender designation.”

Keenan, 55, of Ben Lomond, identifies as intersex, a general term used for a variety of conditions in which a person is born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t seem to fit the typical definitions of female or male.

Intersex is just one type of nonbinary. A nonbinary person is someone whose gender identity is neither man nor woman, is between or beyond genders, or is some combination of genders, according to the UC Berkeley Gender Equity Resource Center. Nonbinary people go by various labels such as “gender queer” or “gender fluid.”

Keenan realized she was different when she failed to hit puberty, yet continued to grow. At the time, her doctors and parents lied to her. Instead of explaining she was born intersex, with a condition known as Swyer syndrome that prevents the body from producing sex hormones, they forced her to conform to life as a woman.

For the next 32 years, the 6-foot-3, “kind of butch androgynous” Keenan did her best to live a lie. Only when doctors at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation produced an accurate diagnosis in 2009 was the retired paralegal finally able to fully embrace her sexual identity.

It wasn’t her only transformation. Keenan was profiled in this newspaper in 2014 when she lost 170 pounds and became an avid hiker.

When a Multnomah County Circuit Court judge legally changed Jamie Shupe’s sex from “female” to nonbinary on June 10, making the 52-year-old Oregon resident the first legal nonbinary person in the nation, Keenan decided to file her own petition.

“Jaime was the first one brave enough to stand before a judge [at the state level] with no precedent and say I have a legal right to be recognized for what I am,” Keenan said. “They cleared the way for the rest of us.”

Shupe uses the collective pronoun “they” or “them” to identify themselves. Keenan, who has been married to her husband David since 1990, chose to retain female pronouns.

Before Shupe, Colorado resident and retired intersex Navy veteran Dana Zzyym applied for a U.S. passport, but was denied. Zzyym’s case is ongoing.

Keenan, with the help of attorney Toby Adams and the Intersex and Genderqueer Recognition Project, decided to keep her court petition quiet and unpublicized.

“I thought it would be a long, slow legislative process,” Keenan said. “As it turned out, all I had to do was alter a court document — I just drew in a third box and checked it.”

Keenan’s Sept. 26 petition was a test case for five other petitions that will be submitted in San Francisco, Alameda, Santa Clara and Sacramento counties over the next few weeks.

“We didn’t want to put any undue pressure on the judge or turn it into a media circus,” Keenan said. “Of course, if it had failed, the next petitioners would have used publicity.”

Instead, Judge Atack approved Keenan’s petition, but not before acknowledging he was creating “future problems” for both Keenan and the state of California.

And Keenan’s work is just the beginning. She is working to convince the California Department of Motor Vehicles to adopt a nonbinary designation and the state of New York’s Bureau of Vital Statistics to change her birth certificate.

“Creating a legal nonbinary designation is just the government and society catching up to reality,” Keenan said. “To believe no blending ever occurs between male and female is like believing the flat earth theory.”

Keenan said she also will continue to work with the Intersex and Genderqueer Recognition Project to address the right of nonbinary adults in the United States to gender-self-identify on legal documents.

“I want more people who never felt like they fit in to jump in,” Keenan said. “The water’s fine; it feels good.”

Editor’s Note: This story was updated to correct an error.