The new policy could have wide-reaching impact and could affect many of the 92,000 trans adults living in Texas.

By Lil Kalish

Emily Bray was supposed to be celebrating on Tuesday morning. After years of trying to change her name and gender marker, the 27-year-old YouTuber received an official court order from a Texas judge that she was at last, in the eyes of the state, the woman she had long known herself to be.

But that elation was short-lived.

An hour later, she logged onto the private Facebook group where she and other trans Texans discussed the bureaucracy of changing one’s name and gender in a state that is becoming increasingly hostile to trans people. One person shared that they had gone into the Department of Public Safety to update their driver’s license that day and learned that the agency had issued a new policy, barring the use of court orders or birth certificates to change one’s listed sex.

“There’s no other way to describe it than a gut punch,” Bray told HuffPost.

  • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
    91·
    2 months ago

    On one hand, very much yes, especially given the details mentioned in the article:

    The internal DPS email also directs employees to send the names and identification numbers of people requesting a change, and to “scan into the record” all documentation about court-ordered sex marker changes to an internal email address with the subject line “Sex Change Court Order.”

    It is unclear how this information will be used. But two years ago, the Republican attorney general previously sought data from the DPS about how many Texans had changed the legal sex marker on their licenses.

    Paxton has long targeted trans Texans, launching various investigations into hospitals, LGBTQ+ organizations and providers, and has likened gender-affirming care for youth to “child abuse.” At the time of Paxton’s request two years ago, a DPS spokesperson told The Washington Post that the data could not be “accurately produced” and the agency hadn’t sent any to Paxton’s office.

    On the other hand, I’m finding it difficult to reconcile the idea of deliberately getting a court order to change your personal information on an official government document and then also wanting the record of that change to be kept secret from the government. It seems to me the problem isn’t the government having that information – which honestly ought to have been trivially available simply as a side effect of properly designing a court records database and not required compiling separately to begin with – but rather that Texas is failing to remove dangerous abusive bad actors from positions of power.

    • femtech@midwest.social
      131·
      2 months ago

      It’s not hiding it from the government, it’s about not making a list of trans people for the neo Nazis to target. Emailing all pii to a single email address is is asinine.

      • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        2 months ago

        It’s “security through obscurity.” Court records are public: even in the best-case scenario of completely uncooperative bureaucrats, that list would only be a FOIA request and some clerical grunt work away.

        • femtech@midwest.social
          91·
          2 months ago

          Foia request does not get peoples records. This is Republicans trying to build a list of trans people to do harm.

          Information/data that is NOT covered by the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) includes: Non-agency records and personal records.

          • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
            31·
            2 months ago

            Okay, so maybe I got that detail wrong. But still, the fundamental purpose of officially changing one’s name is for other people to recognize the change and start using it. For that to happen, it makes no sense for it to be a secret. Hell, it’s often the case that part of the process is a requirement to publish your name change in an ad in the local newspaper!

            To reiterate what I already made crystal clear up front: yes, I understand that it’s bad for Republicans to be building a list of trans people to do harm! I’m just not sure it’s realistic to think they can practically be prevented from it, if they’re motivated enough, by any means short of not changing your name to begin with. (Well, that or the actual solution of removing dangerous hateful transphobes from positions of authority, anyway.)

            • killingspark@feddit.orgEnglish
              31·
              2 months ago

              I think the point is that there should be as little remembrance of the change itself. To anyone, even the government, that doesn’t need to know it should look like you had that gender all along

              • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
                3·
                2 months ago

                I guess I’m just skeptical of the concept of “as little remembrance” in the digital age, as opposed to considering it a binary choice between “completely forgotten” and “easy to look up.”