Texas AG says courts can’t force state agencies to update trans people’s IDs
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton declared Friday that state court orders to change the sex markers on Texas birth certificates, driver’s licenses and other state-issued IDs are no longer valid.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton declared Friday that state court orders to change the sex markers on Texas birth certificates, driver’s licenses and other state-issued IDs are no longer valid.
State agencies have already prohibited transgender people from changing the sex markers on their birth certificates and driver’s licenses through internal policy changes last year. Paxton’s new directive requires them to go further and revert back any sex marker changes that were the result of court orders. The directive is the first of its kind nationwide and marks yet another escalation in the state’s nearly decadelong effort to restrict the rights of trans people.
“There are only two sexes, and that is determined not by feelings or ‘gender theory’ but by biology at conception,” Paxton said in a statement Friday. “Radical left-wing judges do not have jurisdiction to order agencies to violate the law nor do they have the authority to overrule reality. In Texas, we will follow common sense and restore any documents that were wrongfully changed to be consistent with biology.”
Paxton’s directive came via a nonbinding legal opinion in response to a request from Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), in September. McCraw asked the attorney general whether Texas courts have the authority to order state agencies to change a person’s sex designation on government documents. If they don’t, McCraw continued, do agencies like DPS have the authority to revert back sex markers for trans Texans whose documents were changed by court orders?
McCraw said in his request that there has been a “years-long and state-wide effort to alter government records to reflect gender identity.” He added that judges who approve sex-marker changes on documents “may do so with no scrutiny whatsoever,” citing local news reports about lawyers helping trans clients update their Texas documents.
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