Texas AG Wanted List Of Every Trans Person In His State
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Inching closer and closer to the unimaginable horrors of history, Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton demanded a list be compiled of every transgender person in his State. The point of going on such a sinister pursuit of procuring public records of trans residents that had changed their Driver’s License marker, applied for gender marker alterations on documents such as a state ID is unclear leaving the community wondering how Paxton sought to use this master list of all known trans individuals statewide. He has not cared to explain why. “I can’t say.” He replied when asked.
According to an email obtained by The Washington Post last June, the Attorney General sent a missive insisting Texas Department of Public Safety provide him with the: “Total number of changes from male to female and female to male” on driver’s licenses “for the last 24 months, broken down by month.” This data would have provided names, as well as other identifying information such as home address, social security number, date of birth and photo.
And the Department of Public Safety complied with the bizarre request, compiling a list of 16,466 individuals who had applied for or were granted permission to change gender markers on official documentation from between June 1, 2020 and June 30, 2022.
Speaking on the terms of anonymity, a current Department of Safety employee confessed to the Post that AG Paxton had bypassed traditional channels in pursuit of the data, which usually must be granted access to only by general counsel's office or the Department of Safety’s government relations committee, but Paxton avoided them altogether, instead going around them in order to achieve his goal- and immediately to the administrative staff of Driver’s License Division with his solicitation for demographic data targeting transgender people.
The staff was explicitly directed to turn over a trove of data via a list that would first provide numbers data, but later expounded on the demand for data that included identifying trans people- specifically of those “Who have had a sex change.” The email said.
