Normally when we worry about big government surveilling its own people, it’s a hostile foreign country with a history of oppression.
In this case, it’s the office of Attorney General Ken Paxton, which, according to reporting from The Washington Post, used driver’s license and state identification data in an attempt to draw up information on Texans who had changed their gender identity.
That’s both creepy and scary, and Paxton owes the public an explanation of exactly what happened.
According to The Post, “Paxton’s office bypassed normal channels — DPS’s government relations and general counsel’s office — and went straight to the driver license division staff in making the request.”
An unnamed state employee The Post quoted said “Paxton’s office wanted ‘numbers’ and later would want ‘a list’ of names.”
That is a shocking invasion of Texans’ privacy. Paxton’s office isn’t quite denying this happened, but it isn’t admitting it either.
“Why would the Office of the Attorney General have gathered this information?” a top aide asked The Post.
That’s exactly what we would like to know, because the records The Post gathered from DPS make it clear that this was a request from Paxton’s office.
“DPS provided The Post with a half-dozen documents spanning three months that reference the request by Paxton’s office,” the paper reported.
The request was partially filled, with more than 16,000 gender changes. Of course, those could be clerical errors or for any other reason. Thankfully, DPS was unable to name names based on the data it could collect.
Paxton has acted far beyond the scope of his office in targeting the families of transgender children for investigation. And he has created an openly hostile environment for transgender Texans of all ages. This latest act is an outrage.
There are reasons to harbor serious concerns about so-called gender affirming care, and especially the trend of giving prepubescent children hormones to prevent the onset of puberty. Doctors in Texas who are still prescribing that course of care should be aware that what they are doing is unproven and that it could have profound physical and psychological effects on their patients.
England’s National Health Service is only the latest major European health service to suspend gender-affirming therapy outside of a very strictly controlled research setting.
According to guidelines issued Oct. 20, the NHS found that the “current evidence base is insufficient to predict the long-term outcomes of complete gender-role transition during early childhood” and that “social transition be viewed as an ‘active intervention’ because it may have significant effects on the child or young person in terms of their psychological functioning.”
Those are the most serious scientific and medical concerns. None of them justify what appears to be a gross violation of the privacy of Texas residents. It’s none of the attorney general’s business how many Texans are transgender. And it certainly isn’t his business to learn about it through state records.
The public is owed an accounting of what happened here. The only certainty is we won’t get a straight answer from Paxton or his office.
>> The Dallas Morning News
