Samples of Florida driver's licenses and learner permit. | Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles
Published on January 31, 2024 at 4:09 pm
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A change in Florida’s driver’s license policy on gender identity has stirred up concerns of harassment among Jacksonville’s transgender community.
The state’s Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles mandated last week that the gender listed on a driver’s license must match a person’s sex at birth. The rule reverses the department’s own decision in 2018 that allowed a person to change the gender on their license if they identify as another gender or have changed their gender medically.
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The new memo, issued Friday, states that no one can request a new license solely to “alter the gender marker.” The only allowable reason for a new license is loss or theft of the original or an address or name change, spokeswoman Molly Best said.
“Expanding the department’s authority to issue replacement licenses dependent on one’s internal sense of gender or sex identification is violative of the law and does not serve to enhance the security and reliability of Florida issued licenses and identification cards,” Best said in a written statement. “The security, reliability and accuracy of government issued credentials is paramount.”
The Florida Democratic Party immediately protested the move. Chair Nikki Fried said the change reinterprets existing statute to equate gender identity with biological sex and threatens transgender Floridians with criminal and civil penalties.
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“Florida Republicans’ obsession with trans people has to stop,” Fried said in a statement Tuesday. “Instead of addressing our raging property insurance crisis or out-of-control rent hikes, the GOP continues to pursue blatantly transphobic policies to serve their made-up culture wars. Erasing and criminalizing trans people is absolutely disgusting and can’t be allowed to stand.”
The founder of the Transgender Awareness Project in Jacksonville angily posted a challenge on her Facebook page. Paige Mahogany Parks wrote, “The Republicans Are Trying To ERASE The Trans Community. This Should Bring The Trans/LGBTQ+Community Together To Push Back HATE.”
“There’s already enough going on with these anti-LGBTQ+ bills that they just passed,” Parks told Jacksonville Today. “It’s crazy, because if I am a woman, and I am a trans woman, and I lose my ID and have to go back and get a new one, they are going to put what I was born as on my ID. They will not even look at the birth certificate that’s been changed, none of that.”
When the state changed the driver’s license gender policy in 2018, it allowed people to alter the genetic markers on them with signed statements from doctors or court orders documenting gender changes, according to the News Service of Florida. In part, that policy required license bureau employees to treat people seeking such changes “respectfully.” In 2021, the process was expanded to allow advanced-practice registered nurses to attest to the gender changes.
But the department said last week that those provisions “are not supported by statutory authority.”
The change comes from Director Dave Kerner, appointed last year by Gov. Ron DeSantis. He told senior department leadership to ensure its policies, procedures and technical guidance and advisories were consistent with both statutory law and the department’s authority, Best said.
The memo said that permitting someone to alter his or her license to reflect an “internal sense of gender role or identity, which is neither immutable nor objectively verifiable, undermines the purpose of an identification record and can frustrate the state’s ability to enforce its laws.”
The memo also warned that “misrepresenting one’s gender, understood as sex, on a driver license constitutes fraud.” People could be subject to criminal and civil penalties, including cancellation, suspension or revocation of the driver’s license.
The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office and Florida Highway Patrol did not respond to questions about how its officers will handle the new driver’s license gender rule.
Fried, the Democratic Party chair, said DeSantis has continually weaponized state agencies and the latest step serves the same purpose as the rest — allowing “right-wing extremists to get the wildly unpopular policies they want without having to go on the record as voting for them.”
Nathan Bruemmer, the head of the state’s LGBTQ+ Democratic Caucus, said the state should not sanction hate, violence or cruelty.
“Being forced to live, work and contribute in society without accurate, updated identification will have immediate impacts on a community already experiencing harassment, violence and discrimination at higher rates,” Bruemmer said. “Our government agencies must remember that their responsibility is to serve Floridians — not the failed agenda of a power-hungry governor who is out of touch with the people of Florida.”
The possibility that a trans man or woman could be criminally charged for misrepresenting their gender is wrong, Parks said.
An attorney with Southern Legal Counsel, who helped craft the 2018 policy, told the News Service of Florida that the changes do not appear to affect trans people whose licenses already have been altered. Simone Chriss said “there’s a lot of ambiguity (in the new policy) and a lot of questions that we will need answers.”
“Based on the statutes they’ve cited and the authority they’ve provided, there’s no reason for individuals who currently have a driver’s license or identification card that reflects their gender identity to be concerned about driving, going to appointments, using their ID in the traditional manner they do every day,” Chriss said. “There’s no mechanism by which the (Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles) or the police have any authority to suspend or revoke their license.”
Since learning of the gender rule change, Parks, the founder of the Transgender Awareness Project in Jacksonville, said she has been seeking partnerships with groups like Black Voters Matter and Equality Florida so they can “raise hell in Tallahassee.
“That’s the problem — not too many of us are going to Tallahassee to raise hell. We are just sitting back and letting those representatives do what they want to do,” Parks said. “And as long as we don’t fight, guess what’s going to happen? And you see what’s already happened with the trans bill and drag queen bill — they are just doing it to erase the trans community. That’s what’s happening here.”
Separately, the House Select Committee on Health Innovation last week approved a bill (HB 1639) that would require driver’s licenses to reflect a person’s sex, based on “the person’s sex chromosomes, naturally occurring sex hormones, and internal and external genitalia present at birth.”
The bill is co-sponsored by Republican Rep. Dean Black of Jacksonville.
