OBS Presser In Regard to the ATF’s Changes to 4473
By now you’ve probably all heard about the ATF’s plan to require biological sex on all Form 4473s.
Back in November 2025 our founder and president Erin Palette, who is also the National Coordinator for the Pink Pistols, was asked for her thoughts on this very topic by Eve Weston of the Eugene Weekly. That article is linked below to prevent throttling.
Ms Palette crafted a press release as an official answer, then waited for the ATF’s rule to make national news. When that didn’t come, she hoped that the ATF had decided to drop the issue. This seemed reasonable in light of the previous pushback in September by the National Rifle Association and other gun rights groups when the US Department of Justice floated the idea of banning transgender people from firearm ownership. However, it appears that the ATF was instead planning to unveil it along with a host of other new rules and hope it didn’t get noticed.
Well, we noticed. The opinion of Operation Blazing Sword – Pink Pistols has not changed since 20 November 2025. The Second Amendment applies to all Americans, including transgender and non-binary Americans. Nothing in federal law makes it illegal to be transgender or non-binary, which means nothing in federal law strips them of the right to purchase, keep, and bear arms.
This new directive from ATF, stating that firearm purchasers shall identify themselves by their biological sex on the Firearm Transaction Record – Form 4473, forces lawful gun purchasers into an impossible bind. A transgender woman who writes ‘female’ on her Form 4473 risks being accused of providing false identifying information under the President’s order. If she instead writes ‘male,’ she risks being accused of providing identifying information that no longer matches the appearance of her lived identity, undermining the form’s stated purpose of helping law enforcement identify a purchaser. That Catch-22 is not a safety measure. It is a trap.
This contradiction is especially ironic given that the ATF itself added a ‘non-binary’ option to the Form 4473 in December 2019, during President Trump’s first term. The Trump administration raised no objection at the time, or at any point before he left office in January 2021. This sudden reversal is not about policy consistency; it is about political pandering.
The federal government does not get to play ‘gotcha’ with constitutional rights. Creating a paperwork contradiction designed to intimidate a minority group out of exercising a fundamental right raises serious equal-protection and due-process concerns. If the government creates conditions where the only safe option for a transgender or non-binary person is to forego gun ownership entirely, that is not regulation; that is disenfranchisement disguised as regulation.
Whether the ATF’s Firearm Transaction Record – Form 4473 can survive post-Bruen constitutional scrutiny is an open question. What is not in question is that the Constitution does not permit the federal government to target a class of citizens for second-tier rights. Operation Blazing Sword – Pink Pistols will continue to oppose any policy that attempts to do so.
