A new report by the Washington Post, published today (Wednesday, Dec. 14) claims that Texas’ virulently homophobic state attorney general, Ken Paxton, in June asked employees at the Texas Department of Public Safety to compile a list of everyone in Texas who changed their gender markers on their Texas driver’s license and other DPS records during the past two years.
Documents obtained by The Post via a public records request showed that the chief of the DPS driver’s license division sent an email to colleagues on June 30 reading, “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.” DPS spokesman Travis Considine told The Post that after finding more than 16,000 gender marker changes, DPS officials decided they would have to do a manual search to find out why those changes were made.
But, Considine said, DPS officials ultimately told the AG’s office that “the data neither exists nor could be accurately produced.