Texas Is Refusing to Explain Why It’s Compiling a List of Trans Residents

Texas is reportedly collecting the names and details of its trans residents who attempted to update their license information from August 2024 to August 2025, and refusing to provide a legitimate reason as to why. Which is… terrifying, anti-Democratic, and quite creepy. (Coincidentally not coincidentally, all three traits reek of GOP Attorney General Ken Paxton.)

According to the Texas Newsroom, a coalition of five public radio stations across the Lone Star State, the list has more than 100 names on it, all of which were collected by workers at the state’s Department of Public Safety (DPS) and sent to a special email account that was created to compile the data. This email account started collecting data after the DPS claimed it would stop complying with requests for sex marker updates on licenses, and told its workers to forward any requests for such to the address in question with the subject line “Sex Change Court Order.” In March, Paxton reiterated that state agencies should deny court orders to change the sex on someone’s license or birth certificate.

Paxton and Gov. Greg Abbott (R) still haven’t explained why the state would—for whatever reason—be collecting the names and details of trans people. (We’ve reached out to the two of them for comment, and we’ll update this piece if we hear back.) But given the two have excitedly locked instep with Trump’s anti-trans animus, I’m not too optimistic anything they say will provide much reassurance.

The move raises questions of “how this information will be leveraged in terms of drafting and crafting additional legislation,” Landon Richie, a policy coordinator at Transgender Education Network of Texas, told KUT. “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.”

And Paxton tried a similar stunt in 2022, when he attempted to get the DPS to compile a similar list. At the time, DPS agents denied the request, saying there was no way to tell when someone was updating their data because of a clerical error, or because they changed their gender. (Bear in mind, this is the same freak who sued the Biden administration in September 2024 for protecting abortion patients’ records from his grasp.)

Texas is home to more than 2 million LGBTQ+ people and, according to data obtained last year by Every Texan, more than 92,000 trans adults live in the Lone Star State. But the state has also lambasted its LBGTQ+ communities, and in January, shortly after Trump published several anti-trans executive orders, Abbott issued a directive that commanded state officials to “reject woke gender ideologies”, signed House Bill 229 to define “two sexes,” and as of this month, enforced a “bathroom bill” that prohibits individuals from using facilities that do not match their sex at birth.

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