DPS Director Steve McCraw
Not only are officials in the Texas Department of Public Safety ignoring court orders for name and gender marker changes on state-issued IDs and driver licenses, as Dallas Voice reported here, now they want to go back and reverse such changes that have already been made.
According to a report published Wednesday, Oct. 2, by the Huffington Post, DPS Director Steve McCraw sent a letter in mid-September asking Attorney General Ken Paxton for a legal opinion on whether the agency can “voluntarily” change back gender markers on driver licenses and state IDs that went into effect before the “no changes” rule was established in August.
Considering that Paxton is Texas’ transphobe-in-chief who set this all in motion by asking DPS to send him a list of every Texan who requested a gender marker change, it’s highly likely that Paxton’s totally unbiased legal opinion will be, “Yes, of course you can — and should — do that.”
According to HuffPo, McCraw asks in his letter whether — since the DPS is not a party to court proceedings in which individuals ask for name and gender marker changes — the agency is compelled to follow the court’s orders. He also asks for guidance on what constitutes “satisfactory proof” substantiating gender marker changes and argues that court orders are insufficient proof because sex is a “fixed and biological fact.”
(Sex and gender, by the way, are not fixed biological facts, according to scientists.)
McCraw in August announced that he would be retiring at the end of this year after 15 years as head of DPS.
The Texas Department of Health and Human Services also recently changed its policies and will no longer acknowledge court orders for gender marker changes.” Both DPS and DSHS made these policy updates in secret without any public notification.
— Tammye Nash