Transgender Floridians will no longer be able to change their gender on Florida driver’s licenses, the state’s Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles said in a memo laying out its policy change.
The department sent the memo to county tax collectors last week. The change appears to have been made without public input.
Before, people were allowed to change the gender on their driver’s license if they had a physician’s certified letter stating the person is undergoing clinical treatment for gender transition, according to the National Center for Transgender Equality.
After being appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis last year, the department’s executive director, Dave Kerner, asked leadership to make sure policies and procedures were in line with statute, department spokesperson Molly Best said in an email.
“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 wrote. “The security, reliability, and accuracy of government issued credentials is paramount.”
In the memo to county tax collectors, deputy executive director Robert Kynoch said the current practice for changing gender on state IDs isn’t supported by state statute. Kynoch wrote that the department “can issue a replacement license only when a license or permit is lost or stolen, or when there is a subsequent change in the licensee’s name, address, or restrictions.”
The memo then says that the term “gender” on an ID does not refer to an internal sense of gender identity, but rather has “commonly been understood” as a synonym for sex.
“Permitting an individual 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,” Kynoch said in the memo.
Simone Chriss, director of the transgender rights initiative at the Southern Legal Counsel, said the state statute governing driver’s licenses does not define gender, and that by saying it refers to sex, the department “just made that up.”
Kynoch, in his memo, added that “misrepresenting one’s gender, understood as sex, on a driver license constitutes fraud” and could lead to criminal or civil penalties, including the revocation of a driver’s license.
Chriss said that someone with a changed gender on their driver’s license didn’t commit fraud and can’t be held liable because they were following the policy at the time. She also said the department made the change without using the rulemaking process, which is only supposed to happen if the change isn’t substantive.
“People deserve due process, and the right to have public comment and a say,” Chriss said.
Florida Democrats denounced the change, with party chairperson Nikki Fried saying in a statement it was “disgusting and can’t be allowed to stand.”
“We’ve seen state agencies continually weaponized under Ron DeSantis, and this rule change at the (Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles) 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,” Fried said in a statement.
A bill moving through Florida’s House, HB 1639, would similarly require that sex, not gender, be listed on state IDs. That legislation has no Senate companion.
Florida’s driver’s license change isn’t the first time executive agencies under DeSantis or DeSantis appointees have opted to affect transgender people through rulemaking instead of through lawmaking. The Agency for Health Care Administration prohibited Medicaid from covering gender dysphoria treatments after an internal process that veered from agency norms. And before a law last year banned children from receiving medical treatment for gender dysphoria, the state’s medical boards prohibited the practice.
