This Houston Landing story from Friday covers the recent news about the very quiet policy changes regarding birth certificates and drivers licenses, and adds some extra information at the end. I’m going to focus on that part of it.
The policy change not only affects crucial everyday tasks like opening a bank account or getting a loan, but it could also pose a public safety risk, particularly for Black and Brown trans people when dealing with the police, said Johnathan Gooch with LGBTQ+ advocacy rights organization Equality Texas.
“If a driver’s license doesn’t match (their) gender, that can be alarming,” Gooch said. “If a cop isn’t trained well or doesn’t understand transgender identity that could cause a further stressful situation. Who knows how that would go down.”
[…]
Although these policy changes currently only target the trans population, Shelly Skeen, regional director at Lambda Legal, a human rights organization, said that it’s something that should trouble all Texans.
“Every Texan should be concerned if the staff is creating a special repository and keeping information about any subset of our population,” she said.
Advocates say some also fear the impact these policy changes will have on voting.
“People are concerned about, what if they have the wrong gender marker on their ID when that shouldn’t matter?” Gooch said. “The election official should only look at their name, but it still creates a bit of fear in people who might have misaligned identity documents.”
Advocacy organizations like Equality Texas and the Transgender Education Network of Texas advise the community to use federal forms of identification, such as passports or passport cards, for things like voting.
[…]
ACLU Texas and Lambda Legal are gathering information before deciding if they’ll take legal action against the policy changes.
“As it stands right now, I don’t think it has legal legs to stand on,” Hall said.
Lambda Legal has seen success challenging similar cases in other areas that have come before Texas like Kansas, Idaho, Ohio and Puerto Rico so far, but right now, it’s focused on assessing the impact these changes will have on people, Skeen said.
“What’s been found on the basis of sex is that you have to show what’s called a ‘sufficiently important reason’ that’s substantially related to the policy, and that that reason is exceedingly persuasive,” she said. “So, if the government is going to do something different and not treat people the same, then they need to have an important reason substantially related to the justification. … and it can’t be a made up reason after the fact.”
In the cases they’ve won, the court has determined that the reasons have not met that standard, she said.
But she acknowledged that the policy changes at both DPS and DSHS are “out of the norm” given both agencies’ longtime practice of changing things like names, gender and sex, and the government’s checks and balances system.
“From a practical standpoint, it doesn’t make any sense,” Skeen said.
“These are court orders issued by courts. The executive branch, which is where the AG is, can’t tell the court (judicial branch) what to do or what not to do.”
See here and here for the background. I have the same sense of incredulity over the directive to ignore court orders, but until further notice the law is what Ken Paxton and his judicial enablers say it is. To that end, I do expect there to be litigation over this, but I have no idea what the best way to proceed is, given what a landmine both the state and federal courts here can be. I don’t envy the legal groups that have to come up with a strategy for this. The short term looks grim. I really hope to be proven wrong about that.
Have the judge that issued the order for the gender change send out a bailiff to bring the head of whichever department is in charge of this to the court in handcuffs. Then jail them for contempt.