Government

Texas AG Paxton Wants to Build A Registry Of Trans People, But He Won't Say Why

But we can't have a registry of gun owners, because ... CONSTITUTION!

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Ken Paxton

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton keeps finding new and creative ways to be horrible.

The famously corrupt official loves to bash immigrants, of course, but he takes particular zeal in endangering the LGBTQ+ community. He’s already tried to classify medically approved gender affirming care for trans kids as child abuse and threatened drag performers who allow kids to attend their shows. And now it looks like he’s got transgender adults in his sights, too.

The Washington Post reports that Paxton’s office made a verbal request to the Texas Department of Public Safety in June for a list of everyone in the past two years who’d changed their gender on their drivers license. Texas has strong public records laws, but the Post’s request to the AG’s office for communications came up empty. It was only DPS which documented the request in writing.

“Need total number of changes from male to female and female to male for the last 24 months, broken down by month,” the DPS head of the drivers license division wrote in a June 30 email. “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.”

As the Post points out, the AG didn’t direct the query to DPS’s lawyers or its government relations office, instead going in the back door, as it were, through the drivers license division. And Paxton’s team has a habit of not putting things in writing when they’re doing something particularly evil.

“Email is not the platform for opinions or discussion on this topic,” a member of his staff wrote in February about the attack on care for trans kids. “Please immediately CALL ME to staff; no emails or texts are allowed,” another wrote.

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So it’s not exactly surprising that Paxton’s office said it had no communications regarding the intrusive request to DPS.

“None of the records provided by the Texas Department of Public Safety are communications with the Office of the Attorney General. Our response to your request was accurate,” Assistant Attorney General Lauren Downey told the Post when confronted with internal DPS communications about the request. A public records request about meetings and phone calls regarding the DPS record query is still pending.

In the event, the search appears to have turned up so many hits as to have been functionally useless.

“A verbal request was received,” DPS spokesman Travis Considine told the Post. “Ultimately, our team advised the AG’s office the data requested neither exists nor could be accurately produced. Thus, no data of any kind was provided.”

Which is hardly reassuring to the trans Texans whose personal data Paxton was seeking to access. And no one knows what kind of attack on the dignity of LGBTQ+ people this guy was planning, but judging from his effort to hide what he was doing, it’s clear that it was not good.

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Texas attorney general’s office sought state data on transgender Texans [WaPo]

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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