Texas Quietly Just Made Life Much Harder For Trans People

Transgender Texans are no longer able to update the sex marker listed on their state driver’s licenses, even if they have officially updated their birth certificates or other legal documents, according to an internal policy issued by Texas’ Department of Public Safety this week.

“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,” Sheri Gipson, the chief of Texas’ Driver License Division, wrote in an email reviewed by HuffPost. The Texas Newsroom, Austin’s NPR affiliate, first reported the policy change on Wednesday.

“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,” the policy stated. Texans who have already changed their gender marker will still be able to renew their driver’s licenses and IDs.

In an email with the subject line “Court Order Notice to Employees,” Gipson also wrote that all documentation about requests for court-ordered sex marker changes will be scanned and sent to the department via an internal email address, along with the customer’s name and driver’s license number.

“This email address is for internal reporting only and should not be shared with customers,” Gipson’s email stated.

Until Tuesday, the Texas Department of Public Safety had a “gender change” policy that allowed residents to update their sex marker with a court order or updated birth certificate. That policy is no longer available on the state’s website.

The new guidance creates a new set of barriers for trans Texans who need correct IDs to participate in areas of public life like voting, going to airports and banks and applying for jobs.

It is unclear what prompted the change. The department did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.

The new policy could affect many of the the 92,000 trans adults in Texas, Brad Pritchett, the interim CEO of LGBTQ+ advocacy group Equality Texas, said in a statement to HuffPost.

“This new policy from DPS denies trans people the minimum respect of having a state ID that reflects their identity,” Prtichett wrote. “Now DPS has created a system to log every request for a gender marker change. Texans will now be subject to involuntary surveillance for simply trying to update a government document. There is no clear reason why this information would be useful to the DPS nor is there a legitimate reason to deny gender marker updates on driver’s licenses.”

Two years ago, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sought data from the DPS about how many Texans had changed the legal sex marker on their licenses. In 2022, after getting a “verbal request” from Paxton’s office, a DPS spokesperson wrote in an email to the Washington Post that the information could not be “accurately produced” and that the agency hadn’t sent data to Paxton.

It was unclear at the time who in Paxton’s office had initiated the records request.

State legislatures and internal agencies around the U.S. have been attempting to erase trans identity from the law and enforce a rigid binary framework for regulating gender.

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led roadmap for a second Donald Trump presidency, calls for the deletion of the terms “gender identity” and “sexual orientation” from all federal rules and regulations, contracts and legislation.

“Gender identity” is a term that originated in psychiatry and is commonly understood as one’s internal sense of self, which can be the same or differ from one’s sex assigned at birth. Conservative lawmakers, think tanks, and organizers are pushing to solely use the word “sex” and to refer only to someone’s sex assigned at birth, regardless of their gender identity.

Conservatives have also pushed for including the term “biological sex” in rules and laws to define sex narrowly by birth anatomy, though this defies modern science. Including this language, as many states have already done, prevents the legal recognition of trans people and bolsters legislation to bar trans people ― and trans women in particular ― from public life, including from sports teams and public restrooms.

A change similar to Texas’ new policy has already taken effect at Florida’s Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, which in January issued a “memo” stating that residents could no longer update or change their gender on state driver’s licenses.

Trans Floridians have also run into issues when trying to update their birth certificates. Numerous trans minors and adults have reportedly been denied amended birth certificates, even when all of their other government-issued documents reflected their current gender identity.

Legal experts and Democrats in Congress believe Florida’s driver’s license memo likely violates federal law, but conservative judges have ruled that similar driver’s license policies in other states can legally bar trans people from obtaining documentation with the correct gender identity. Related policies have gone into effect in Kansas and Montana this year.