Texas AG Ken Paxton and Gov. Greg Abbott Violated Numerous Laws to Ban Trans People From Updating Their Gender Markers, Records Show

Texas has been illegally enforcing its ban on gender marker changes for the past two years. AG Ken Paxton and Gov. Greg Abbott, who led its abrupt implementation, have likely known all along.

Ken Paxton (left) and Greg Abbott (right) | Images: Wikimedia Commons

On August 20th, 2024, the Texas Department of Public Safety shocked the nation when it abruptly announced that, effective immediately, trans Texans would no longer be able to update their gender markers on their driver’s licenses and other state-issued IDs. At the time, the announcement made the state just the third—after Tennessee and Florida—to implement such a ban, and its execution was certainly unusual: aside from rejecting lawfully issued court orders, DPS instructed all employees to report those who ask about changing their gender to an internal email address. As it was revealed later, the state has been using that information to keep a list of its trans residents—a list that has 110 names as of July 2025.

A week later, internal coordination became evident after the Department of Health and Human Services, which is responsible for issuing birth certificates, quietly made a similar policy change. According to the Austin-based outlets KXAN and KUT, these changes were made at the urging of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and were approved by Texas’ governor, Greg Abbott. Both Paxton and Abbott have a history of harshly and abruptly weaponizing the state’s laws against the trans community, a record that includes launching child abuse investigations into several Texas families over gender-affirming care—which was legal in the state at the time—in 2022.

And the state only continued to double down: in March 2025, Paxton released a non-binding opinion declaring all gender change court orders invalid and instructing the DPS and HHS to revert gender changes whenever possible. Although the opinion provided some legal backing to the state’s restrictions, it changed little in practice, as the DPS had additionally instructed employees to revert people’s licenses upon renewal when it first changed its policy. But despite these unprecedented actions, the policies, as well as their implementation, were never challenged despite the numerous objections made.

Rather, Texas’ secrecy became an example for other red states to follow. Just this year alone, Transitics was the first to report that Idaho and Wyoming had quietly implemented similar bans as well. But in both cases, investigations from Transitics have concluded that these policies—which only involved changes to internal guidance and were prompted by the passage of laws defining ‘sex’ as ‘biological’ and ‘immutable’—were likely adopted legally.

However, as Transitics has now learned, the same cannot be said for Texas.

Rather, Greg Abbott, Ken Paxton, and the Department of Public Safety all violated numerous laws to implement their state’s ban, and they likely did so knowingly.

This story starts back in March 2008. At the time, Texas, like many others, was updating its driver’s license regulations to comply with the requirements of the then-recently passed REAL ID Act, and due to the rapidly changing landscape, the DPS was looking to make its third change in as many years to 37 TAC §15.24, which concerns documentation requirements for driver’s license applicants. As the state puts it, people were trying to argue that because the rule allowed them to submit any court order showing their name and date of birth, they could “use traffic citations completed with unverified identifying information.” Thus, “to prevent circumvention of the Texas identification requirements,” the state was proposing amending §15.24 to “restrict the acceptable court orders” to two types: “official name and gender changes.”

After receiving no public comments, the proposal was adopted without controversy a mere two months later. Although changes were made to the rule in 2011, the “change of name and/or gender” provision was unaffected and has remained in effect since. Furthermore, that same year, the same language was copied onto a new regulation concerning election identification certificates.

37 TAC §15.24, as it currently reads

And the state has indeed been acutely aware of its inclusion from the beginning. Archived versions of the DPS’ website show that the ‘name and/or gender change’ language from §15.24 was added to the identification requirements page as soon as it was finalized in May 2008. When the DPS got a new website in 2012, §15.24’s full language remained present and was even added to the DPS’ new document requirements brochure in 2015. And when the DPS again redesigned its website in 2021, the section remained untouched. That is, until June 7th, 2024, when the bullet point that mentioned the court orders, which was present in the previous week’s capture, abruptly disappeared from the webpage.

A side-by-side comparison of the page showing the language’s removal

As if this change, which came 2.5 months before the DPS implemented its ban and stopped accepting these orders, wasn’t suspicious enough, it gets worse. The section returned to the page between August 28th and August 30th, 2024—a mere 8–10 days after the ban went into effect—but it now only included court orders “indicating an official change of name.” The “and/or gender changes” language, which legally remains in effect, was and still is nowhere to be found (it does, however, remain present on the brochure).

The DPS’ identification requirements page, as it has read since August 30th, 2024

However, as mentioned above, this change does indeed mirror the DPS’ current practice. According to the guidance email it sent its employees, it will no longer accept court orders that change a person’s gender or those that change both their name and gender in any capacity, even if the person is only requesting a name change.

The only problem is, that’s illegal. Under the Texas Administrative Procedure Act and subsequent precedent established by the state’s Supreme Court, the Department of Public Safety cannot change policies that are officially codified in its regulations without going through the rulemaking process, which involves giving the public at least 30 days’ notice and the opportunity to comment on the proposal. If an agency doesn’t do this, it cannot change the way it enforces a rule, operate as if it has been changed, or tell the public that it has changed. This is especially true if the policy change in question would impose new requirements onto the public.

For the past two years—and with Abbott and Paxton’s approval—the Texas Department of Public Safety has done all of these things. Without notice and without taking public comments, it has stopped honoring the gender change court orders that it legally must honor under its own rule. It has informed all of its employees that these orders, which are explicitly listed as acceptable under its current rules, are no longer acceptable. It has made changes to its public-facing materials that pretend as though the rule has been changed when it hasn’t. And it is imposing new evidentiary requirements onto Texans looking to obtain a driver’s license and keeping an internal list of those who do not comply with the new standards. Each of these actions likely constitutes a separate violation of various sections of the Texas APA, as does every instance of the state’s harsh enforcement of its ban.

And the DPS almost got away with all of this entirely unnoticed. Last month, it finally proposed an updated version of §15.24, and under this, the “and/or gender” language will be formally removed. However, the department is attempting to disguise it through another controversial change, which will require a person who submits a foreign passport during their application to present a valid visa along with it. This changes a decades-old policy that has accepted visas regardless of their validity as long as the applicant can prove being in the US lawfully, and unfortuntately, media organizations have taken the bait. All the current reporting on this rule has centered exclusively on the visa policy and has failed to mention the removal of gender change, and that’s exactly as intended.

The DPS justifies the entire proposal by saying it’s necessary to “align with the REAL ID Act of 2005.” And it is right about that: the REAL ID Act’s requirements, as codified in 6 CFR § 37.11, do explicitly state that a visa presented alongside a foreign passport must be ‘valid’ and ‘unexpired.’ That said, § 37.11 does not prohibit states from accepting gender change court orders; even now, a few red states still require them when changing a person’s gender marker. As such, the DPS is failing to provide a reason or adequate notice for the pending removal of the gender change provision—a requirement that could potentially be satisfied with a statement that merely reads the change is needed “to align with requirements set forth by the Office of the Attorney General.”

Instead, it’s trying to sweep this under the rug entirely, likely a deliberate move meant to divert attention away from the fact that it has illegally enforced its gender change policy for the past two years. At least to Abbott and Paxton, doing so was a necessary risk: issuing a notice would’ve allowed trans people to rush to change their gender markers before the cutoff date. But, by abruptly implementing the ban, they ensured that it would inflict the maximum amount of pain onto the state’s trans people. All they needed was for no one to look too carefully.

And for almost two years, no one did. It makes sense: only 4 other red states address gender changes in their driver’s license regulations—Arkansas, Georgia, Iowa, and West Virginia—and all have a history of being much more progressive than Texas when it comes to trans people. The rest often operate under internal policies, and based on the email that was sent to DPS employees, Texas seemed no different.

However, as it stands today, the Lone Star State’s ban on gender changes—and the list of trans people the Department of Public Safety has been making because of it—now finds itself among the most vulnerable anti-trans policies in the country. It’s up to trans Texans to take it down.