D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray signed a landmark bill Tuesday that has been hailed as one of the most “trans-inclusive” policies in the country.

The Birth Certificate Equality Amendment allows transgender people to change their birth certificates without acquiring a gender reassignment surgery.

“A birth certificate not only validates the gender identity or expression of transgender individuals,” Gray said with about two-dozen LGBT activists around him, “but it also provides them the opportunity they should have been guaranteed in the first place.”

The bill is named after JaParker Deoni Jones, a twenty-three-year-old transgender woman who was stabbed to death at a bus stop in Northeast D.C. last February. The D.C. Council unanimously passed the bill in July. Her parents both attended the bill signing, as well as D.C. delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton.