- cross-posted to:
- texas@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- texas@lemmy.world
By Lil Kalish
Emily Bray was supposed to be celebrating on Tuesday morning. After years of trying to change her name and gender marker, the 27-year-old YouTuber received an official court order from a Texas judge that she was at last, in the eyes of the state, the woman she had long known herself to be.
But that elation was short-lived.
An hour later, she logged onto the private Facebook group where she and other trans Texans discussed the bureaucracy of changing one’s name and gender in a state that is becoming increasingly hostile to trans people. One person shared that they had gone into the Department of Public Safety to update their driver’s license that day and learned that the agency had issued a new policy, barring the use of court orders or birth certificates to change one’s listed sex.
“There’s no other way to describe it than a gut punch,” Bray told HuffPost.
On one hand, very much yes, especially given the details mentioned in the article:
On the other hand, I’m finding it difficult to reconcile the idea of deliberately getting a court order to change your personal information on an official government document and then also wanting the record of that change to be kept secret from the government. It seems to me the problem isn’t the government having that information – which honestly ought to have been trivially available simply as a side effect of properly designing a court records database and not required compiling separately to begin with – but rather that Texas is failing to remove dangerous abusive bad actors from positions of power.
It’s not hiding it from the government, it’s about not making a list of trans people for the neo Nazis to target. Emailing all pii to a single email address is is asinine.
It’s “security through obscurity.” Court records are public: even in the best-case scenario of completely uncooperative bureaucrats, that list would only be a FOIA request and some clerical grunt work away.