The Daily Populous Monday December 29th, 2025 night edition
Authored by houstonpublicmedia.org and submitted by speedythefirst

A year after the state blocked transgender Texans from updating their state IDs, it has collected information on more than 100 people who have tried. Officials won’t say what they’re using the list for.

Demonstrators rally to show support to the transgender community at the Texas State Capitol on the Trans Day of Visibility, April 2, 2022. (Sheryl Wong for KUT)

The state of Texas has continued collecting information on transgender drivers seeking to change the sex listed on their licenses, creating a list of more than 100 people in one year.

According to internal documents The Texas Newsroom obtained through records requests, the Texas Department of Public Safety has amassed a list of 110 people who tried to update their gender between August 2024 and August 2025. Employees with driver's license offices across the state, from El Paso to Paris to Plano, reported the names and license numbers of these people to a special agency email account. Identifying information was redacted from the records released to The Texas Newsroom.

The data was collected after Texas stopped allowing drivers to update the gender on their licenses unless it was to fix a clerical error. It is unclear what the state is doing with this information.

An agency spokesperson did not respond to questions about why the list was created and whether it was shared with any other agencies or state officials. The Texas Newsroom filed records requests in an attempt to find the answers but did not receive any additional information that sheds light on what the state may be doing with these names.

In recent years, GOP lawmakers have passed multiple laws restricting the rights of transgender Texans, including two new measures that went into effect this year.

One defines "male" and "female" on state documents as being based on a person's reproductive system. The other, known as the “bathroom bill,” bars governments from allowing people to use a restroom at public buildings, parks or libraries that do not match their sex at birth.

While it's unclear how the state plans to enforce the bathroom bill, transgender activist Ry Vazquez told KUT News she was asked to show her ID before using a restroom in the state Capitol earlier this month. Vazquez said she and three other people were then cited with criminal trespassing and banned from the building for a year.

Landon Richie, the policy coordinator with the Transgender Education Network of Texas, is concerned that the list the state is keeping will be used to pass more state laws targeting the rights of transgender Texans.

"The state collecting this information raises a lot of red flags, not just in terms of people’s privacy and ability to exist not under a magnifying glass," he said. He added that he wonders "how this information will be leveraged in terms of drafting and crafting additional legislation" to chip away at the civil rights and freedoms of transgender Texans.

There are roughly 161,000 transgender adults living in Texas, or less than 1% of the population, according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.

For years, transgender people in Texas could update their state IDs to match their gender identity by obtaining a court order and then submitting this document to the state agencies that issue driver's licenses and birth certificates. After the state restricted updates to driver's licenses last fall, the state's health agency followed suit, blocking changes to birth certificates other than to correct hospital errors or omissions.

In March, The Texas Newsroom reported that the state was collecting information on people who continued to ask for these changes despite the policy shift.

The attorney general, whose office determines what records are public, allowed the agency to keep other documents about the policy shift secret. But it did release a list of the four employees with access to the special email account.

The Texas Newsroom also obtained records that show the agency investigated threats against the driver's license division chief after news of the policy change was made public. But no case was referred to the Travis County Attorney's Office for prosecution.

The Texas Newsroom has requested an updated version of the list.

Correction: An earlier headline on this story incorrectly referenced the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles, which does not issue driver’s licenses. The Department of Public Safety is responsible for this function, and is the state agency keeping the list of drivers who have requested to update the sex on their licenses.

USSMarauder on December 28th, 2025 at 18:43 UTC »

Just a reminder that Texas Gov Abbot was the moron who was so convinced that Obama was going to invade, conquer and occupy Texas like it was France, and turn it into the first part of the Obamunist Empire, and do it with just 1200 troops, that he partially mobilized the Texas state guard to "monitor" the US army.

greatthebob38 on December 28th, 2025 at 18:38 UTC »

Same guys that hound against the ATF making a list and database of gunowners are ok with a list and database of transgender individuals.

IceNein on December 28th, 2025 at 18:30 UTC »

Republicans. The party of small government, fighting against the nanny state.