Weirdo States Want In Trans Drivers' Pants

Kids too! And actually there's something wrong with that!

Arizona, Missouri, and Texas go balls out to prevent sex updates.

Over the last week, several major developments have hit trans people in different states, with Missouri and Texas throwing up dramatic roadblocks to updating driver’s licenses and other state IDs, and a court in Arizona aborting that state’s efforts to restrict changes to birth certificates.

The Good!

First up is Arizona, which has had (and enforced) a policy barring the amendment of sex markers on birth certificates without documentation of genital surgery.

Roe v. Harrington was filed in 2020 on behalf of three trans children who, because of their youth, were neither eligible for gender-affirming genital surgery, nor could they reasonably be certain that, come adulthood, surgery would have been the correct choice for them. And yet these children, ages 13, 10, and six at the time of filing, and their parents struggled with what are normally very minor tasks of daily life. Changing medical insurance for a child often involves presenting a birth certificate, and one family found that when their insurance changed, simply getting a vaccine required extra effort when providers thought that their child’s name couldn’t be normal for their child’s recorded sex.

The Arizona law at issue applies equally to adults and minors without regard for the additional difficulties for minors, who generally are considered ineligible for reproductive surgery (nearly all trans health surgeries on minors are breast augmentation or reduction procedures, and even these are rare). While the case could have proceeded as an action for the plaintiffs alone, or for trans minors as a class, a year ago US District Judge James Soto certified all trans persons born in Arizona as the relevant class, meaning last Thursday’s outcome applies to everyone, regardless of age. And it is a good outcome!

Soto found that requiring surgery to amend an Arizona birth certificate violates constitutional protections provided by the 14th Amendment. Hooray! Birth certificate gender swaps for all!

The Bad

Also in the past few days Missouri and Texas have issued policies that move their laws in the exact opposite direction. Missouri’s unelected Department of Revenue officials spontaneously decided to no longer accept gender change requests for state IDs (referred to as Form 5532) in a move that became public last Monday. They will now require medical records proving surgical gender reassignment or a court order. But as Judge Soto noted in Roe v. Herrington, most courts have “imported” older standards for legal gender change, and thus frequently require the same surgical documentation. Convincing a court to issue an order otherwise would be difficult and expensive.

No reason was given for the policy change, though there was a minor panic in Missouri at the end of July when a trans woman with an F as her ID’s sex designation used the women’s locker room at a private gym where the woman was a member. Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey made a show of beginning an investigation days before a showdown for the Republican nomination in his reelection bid. The lion’s share of the speculation is that the rejection of future Form 5532s can be traced back to a Republican desire to be seen as fighting everyday trans participation in society even at privately owned businesses.

While that is an obviously testerical overreaction, Texas has gone to additional extremes. Their Department of Public Safety distributed an internal memo dated last Monday (which immediately leaked to The Dallas Voice) in which employees were instructed,

“Effective immediately, the Department will not accept court orders or amended birth certificates issued that change the sex when it differs from the documentation already on file.”

And if you think that refusing court orders is a little too much Madison for your Marbury, the memo continued:

If a single court order contains both a name change and a sex change, we cannot accept the order. The applicant will be processed with no change and with the information on file.

That’s right, even when you have legally changed your name, Texas will knowingly record a false name on your ID to prevent their computers catching trans cootie viruses.

Did you guess Texas could make this worse? Surprise! You are correct! All information about such requests, including the identity of the person requesting a change, are now required to be collected and shared with Attorney General Ken Putin Paxton. He had previously requested just such a database from Texas DPS, which was not able to comply due to record keeping ambiguities. Yet now Paxton will be able to keep a database on all trans people in the state, a wild and fortuitous coincidence for the near-felon!

The Voters

Erin Reed pointed out last week that attacks on trans ID changes are becoming more common. Yr Wonkette would also point out that these attacks are not stopping at making it difficult to vaccinate your trans child. They come in the context of ongoing attacks on voting rights in the USA generally and these very same states specifically.

This is not accidental.

We should all see the GOP’s anti-immigrant and racist voter purges, the calls to repeal the 19th Amendment, and the deliberate efforts to delegitimize trans persons’ very legal, very cool (and very normal) efforts to identify themselves as part of one plan to encourage some votes, prevent others, and discourage many of the votes that they fail to prevent. While Judge Soto’s Herrington decision and the failure of the most recent Arizona voter purge grants reason to hope that in the long run things may change for the better, in the short and medium terms things still look bad for democracy, people of color, and trans folks.

PREVIOUSLY!

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