A special email that was set up to report sex-designation change requests was flooded with complaints and spam to apparently clog up that inbox.
AUSTIN, Texas — The Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) is reportedly running into a lot of criticism after implementing a policy that stops most people from being able to change their sex listed on their driver’s licenses.
Earlier this year, DPS stopped accepting court orders to make those changes. LGBTQ+ rights advocates criticized the state for it, saying it targets transgender Texans.
Now, the only updates allowed are related to errors in filling out forms.
According to the Dallas Morning News, DPS has gotten a lot of feedback about the policy. The North Texas newspaper reports that it filed open records requests with DPS and found that a special email that was set up to report sex-designation change requests was flooded with complaints and spam to apparently clog up that inbox.
DPS released 542 pages of emails. Only 17 of those were tied to court order submissions. The rest were criticism and spam containing things like movie scripts or emails just full of emojis.
The ACLU has called the policy discriminatory and argued DPS cannot ignore court orders and cannot change policy without input from the public.
“This is pretty obviously designed to keep transgender people for having a driver’s license that matches their gender identity,” Ash Hall, policy and advocacy strategist on LGBTQIA+ rights for the ACLU, told KVUE in August. “It’s designed to render transgender Texans invisible even though we’ve always been here. And it’s part of this ongoing attack against transgender people that we’ve been seeing by our state leadership for years now.”
Brad Pritchett, the interim CEO for Equality Texas, said the change could create legal issues for the 93,000 Texans who identify as transgender. Pritchett said when your driver’s license doesn’t match up with other documents, like your passport, that can create issues.
At the time of the policy change, DPS provided the following statement:
“The Office of the Attorney General (OAG) has recently raised concerns regarding the validity of court orders being issued which purport to order state agencies—including DPS—to change the sex of individuals in government records, including driver licenses and birth certificates. Neither DPS nor other government agencies are parties to the proceedings that result in the issuance of these court orders, and the lack of legislative authority and evidentiary standards for the Courts to issue these orders has resulted in the need for a comprehensive legal review by DPS and the OAG. Therefore, as of Aug. 20, 2024, DPS has stopped accepting these court orders as a basis to change sex identification in department records – including driver licenses.”
