Transgender Texans will no longer be allowed to change the sex on their birth certificates to reflect their gender identity.
The policy change comes less than two weeks after Texas banned transgender residents from changing the sex on driver’s licenses or state-issued IDs.
Only clerical errors or omissions made by the hospital can now be amended. Previously, a person could change the sex on their birth certificate and ID with a court order.
The news was first reported by Austin-area NBC affiliate KXAN. A spokesperson for the Texas Department of State Health Services confirmed the change Tuesday afternoon in an email to The Dallas Morning News.
Texas follows a handful of other states that have issued similar policies. According to the Movement Advancement Project, an advocacy group that tracks LGBTQ laws, five states — including Oklahoma, Kansas and Tennessee — have banned people from changing the sex on their birth certificate.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a vocal opponent of gay and transgender rights, has raised questions about the validity of court orders to amend sex, prompting the state’s policy changes.
Brad Pritchett, interim CEO of LGBTQ rights organization Equality Texas, accused Paxton of bullying state agencies and making life more difficult for some Texans.
“Life requires lots of paperwork: birth certificates, social security cards, driver’s licenses,” Pritchett said in an email. “For transgender Texans, many of those documents may hold names that do not reflect who they are, so they need to engage in the tedious and time-consuming process of legally updating their name and gender marker.”
“Paxton can make life in public a nuisance, but he cannot erase transgender Texans from public life,” he added.
The attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to a request for a response Tuesday afternoon.
Paxton has previously sought information on transgender Texans, according to a report in The Washington Post. In 2022, he asked the Department of Public Safety for data on transgender Texans who requested changes on their licenses, the newspaper reported. The agency said it advised Paxton’s office that the data requested did not exist or could not be accurately produced, so it did not provide the requested data.
In a written statement, the health services department included the attorney general’s office in its explanation of the policy change: “Recent public reports have highlighted concerns about the validity of court orders purporting to amend sex for purposes of state-issued documents,” Chris Van Deusen, a spokesperson for the state health department, said in an email. “DSHS is seeking assistance from the Office of Attorney General to determine the applicability of these concerns to amendments to vital records.”
Transgender rights have come under fire in Texas and across the U.S. in recent years. Last year, Texas banned gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth, one of more than 20 states that adopted similar laws. It also prohibited transgender athletes from competing on college sports teams that do not align with their birth sex.
Dozens of school districts across the state, including some in North Texas, have designated which bathrooms transgender students could use, allowed teachers to use students’ biological rather than preferred pronouns and placed restrictions on how teachers could talk about gender and sexuality.
