AG Paxton’s request for gender changes on driver’s licenses poses privacy issues

Once again, it looks as if Ken Paxton and his office have taken the attorney general’s role too far, this time infringing on the privacy rights of nearly 5% of Texans.

In June, employees at the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) received a bizarre request straight from Paxton’s office: to gather a list of people who had changed their gender on their driver’s license the last two years, according to The Washington Post.

Thanks to a public records request, the publication reported the chief of the DPS driver’s license division emailed colleagues: “Need total number of changes from male to female and female to male for the last 24 months, broken down by month.”

More than 16,000 gender changes on Texas driver’s licenses popped up, though DPS does not know for sure if some are duplicates or errors, or why a change was made. In essence, this doesn’t necessarily mean over 16,000 Texans now identify as transgender.

There are several problems with this inquisition, which we presume is related to Paxton’s earlier inquest into how many children are seeking sex-change treatment in Texas — though we don’t know for sure.

It takes considerable effort to change your gender on your driver’s license. According to Travis County’s law library, an individual must first bring a court order or change the gender on their birth certificate. To do that, they need a court order. To retrieve a court order, they must have a letter from a mental health professional that states a diagnosis and that “granting a change of gender/sex marker is in your best interest” as well as additional documents.

The right to such changes could and should be debated in the public sphere, in the medical professions and courtrooms, but even if changes seem unnecessary to Paxton, that does not give his office the green light to go on a witch hunt.

Another troubling aspect of this search is that Paxton’s office skipped going through normal channels, such as the DPS’s general counsel, and just went right to the driver’s license division staff. Additionally, when the Washington Post tried to make a request to Paxton’s office for the records it exchanged with DPS, the attorney general’s staff said no such records existed.

“Marisol Bernal-Leon, a spokeswoman for the attorney general’s office, later emailed that the office ‘has reviewed its files and has no information responsive to your request’ for either records,” The Post reported. It’s one of the story’s most damning lines — this clearly happened, and the attorney general is playing games to hide it.

Paxton’s not only slithering around the DPS office, aiming his search at staff members without decision-making authority, but his office is suggesting no such exchange of information occurred.

A targeted search of a particular demographic, in this case, gender change, is a clear violation of privacy for the individual and should be of no concern to the state, particularly for those who are 18 and over.

Was Paxton’s search related to state officials’ previous concerns for children receiving life-altering sex-change treatments? With this information, did Paxton aim to seek reform in the court system for driver’s license changes or lobby the legislation? We just don’t know, because his office has denied the entire debacle even happened. As far as we know, no attempt to differentiate between minors and adults was specified in the AG’s original request.

Sex-change treatments and gender changes may be a mystery to Paxton’s office, and while protecting teenagers from making decisions they might later regret is important, a search like this including adults and teenagers alike is unlawful and frankly, none of the AG’s business.

This is sneaky, an abuse of power, and hardly transparent — a trifecta that one could even say is grossly hypocritical. This is not the first time his office has been accused of refusing to honor records requests, and it’s disheartening at best, unlawful at worst, to see this practice continue. If the AG’s office is on a targeted witch hunt, at least be honest about it. Furthermore, the attempt to amass information about a specific demographic is a violation of privacy and beneath the attorney general’s office.

This story was originally published January 3, 2023 at 2:33 PM.