AUSTIN, Texas — Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton says state agencies don’t have to comply with orders from state district courts that aim to change a person’s sex on government documents.
Paxton’s response follows a request from the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) over whether it was allowed to make those changes to a driver’s license. DPS and the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) stopped making changes to licenses last year over questions about the validity of those orders.
A number of advocacy groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said the change was discriminatory and illegal.
In an opinion released Friday, Paxton said that court orders that aim to change sex designation force state agencies to violate federal law.
“There are only two sexes, and that is determined not by feelings or ‘gender theory’ but by biology at conception,” Paxton said in a statement Friday regarding the opinion. “Radical left-wing judges do not have jurisdiction to order agencies to violate the law nor do they have the authority to overrule reality. In Texas, we will follow common sense and restore any documents that were wrongfully changed to be consistent with biology.”
The opinion further explained: “Directing these agencies to change the contents of driver’s licenses and birth certificates suspends the longstanding statutory directive that both agencies oversee the fixed contents of these documents. …The face of these orders instead reveals that DPS and DSHS are directed to violate the very statutes they are bound to obey.”
The full legal opinion can be read here.