Trans People's Personal Data Sought by Texas Attorney General
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s staff this summer tried to gather information on transgender people in the state based on who had changed their gender on their driver’s licenses.Someone from Paxton’s office asked the Texas Department of Public Safety to provide a list of these residents, The Washington Post reports.
Because of this request, the head of the department’s driver’s license division emailed coworkers, saying, “Need total number of changes from male to female and female to male for the last 24 months, broken down by month.
We won’t need DL/ID numbers at first but may need to have them later if we are required to manually look up documents.” The Post obtained a copy of the email.However, the department didn’t provide the AG’s office with the information due to logistical problems.
Public Safety staffers found 16,000 instances of gender changes but said they would need to go through all these manually to see why each change was made.“A verbal request was received,” Public Safety spokesman Travis Considine told the Post. “Ultimately, our team advised the AG’s office the data requested neither exists nor could be accurately produced.
