Trans people barred from changing sex on driver's license in F.L.
Florida will no longer allow trans people change the sex on their driver’s license to match their gender identity, creating issues for those who updated other documents.
Florida will no longer allow transgender people to change the sex on their state driver’s license to reflect their gender identity, a policy change that muddles whether trans people who have already updated their documents could face fraud charges for “misrepresenting” their identities.
Robert Kynoch, deputy executive director of the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, wrote in a memo to the department’s executive director on Friday that the department would rescind a provision on “gender requirements” in the Driver License Operations Manual that allowed Floridians to change the gender marker on their licenses.
The department doesn’t have the statutory authority to enforce provisions that allow someone to update the gender marker on their license, according to Kynoch. Florida licenses can now only be replaced when they are lost or stolen, or when a licensee changes their name, address or restrictions.
A driver license service center in Miami, Fla.Jeff Greenberg / Universal Images Group via Getty fileKynoch added that the term “gender” in the provision on gender requirements “does not refer to a person’s internal sense of his or her gender role or identification, but has historically and commonly been understood as a synonym for ‘sex,’ which is determined by innate and immutable biological and genetic characteristics.”
“A driver license is an identification document and, as such, serves a critical role in assisting public and private entities in correctly establishing the identity of a person presenting the license,” Kynoch wrote. “Permitting an individual to alter his or her license to reflect an internal sense of gender role or identity, which is neither immutable nor objectively verifiable, undermines the purpose of an identification record and can frustrate the state’s ability to enforce its laws.”
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