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Texas has been documenting every request from trans people seeking to update their gender.
Texas has been quietly documenting every request from transgender people seeking to legally update their gender — and the state won't reveal why.
The Department of Public Safety has recorded every time a resident requested to update their gender on their driver's license by scanning the information on licenses and sending it to an internal email account, according to documents obtained by Austin’s NPR affiliate The Texas Newsroom. This includes people who have simply asked for information about the process by phone or in-person. At least 42 inquiries have been reported within the last five months.
The state has not said why it is gathering the data, nor whom it is being shared with.
The Department of Public Safety quietly implemented a policy in August preventing trans people from changing their gender marker on driver's licenses. The rule applies even if a person has updated their birth certificate, or even if they have a court order.
The policy was not announced to the public, and instead revealed to state employees in an email from Sheri Gipson, the chief of Texas’ Driver License Division.
“Effective immediately, August 20, 2024, the Department will not accept court orders or amended birth certificates issued that change the sex when it differs from documentation already on file,” the message stated. “For current DL/ID holders, the sex established at the time of original application and listed in the driver record will not be changed unless there was a clerical error."
Employees were instructed to email the internal address any time someone used a court order to request a legal update to their sex, and to include the requestor’s name and ID number with the subject line “Sex Change Court Order."
While the email was initially flooded by LGBTQ+ activists with spam, such as subscriptions to adult websites and the full Bee Movie script, The Texas Newsroom reports that it is being used for its intended purpose now that the spam has died down.
The change comes two years after Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton requested data from the DPS revealing how many people in the state had changed the gender marker on their licenses. The department was unable to provide the information, finding over 16,000 instances of legal gender changes which they said they would need to go through manually to learn why each change was made.
