Ken Paxton’s Anti-Trans Hotline Trolled To Death Following Ban On Drivers License Gender Changes
If it can be accessed via the internet, it will be. That's a fact too many entities learn far too late. Amazingly, this wholly expected outcome often comes as a surprise to entities with lots power, money, or expertise - the sort of people you'd think would have considered all possible outcomes before giving a new internet-facing project the green light.
Instead, the opposite is true, more often than not. Everyone from Pepsico to Taylor Swift to a variety of state governments have discovered belatedly that creating portals internet denizens can access might have been a bad idea.
Earlier this year, the state of Missouri pulled the plug on the snitch line it created for people to report troubling practices" at clinics providing gender-affirming care or advice to residents. The attempt to convert hate speech to state action was immediately undermined by thousands of reports" submitted by people who hated the state more than they hated their fellow human beings. The state tacitly admitted defeat by taking down the reporting form after it was flooded with spam, gibberish, complaints about the state's anti-LGBTQ+ hate, and, of course, numerous copies of the complete Bee Movie" script - the latter of which has become a go-to inbox filler for submission forms internet users object to.
Now, it's time for Texas to get the Bee Movie" treatment. Amongst the numerous hateful laws the state has passed in recent years is a new mandate forbidding residents from altering the gender listed on their drivers licenses, even if the previously-stated gender no longer accurately represents them.
That act of hatred wasn't enough for Attorney General Ken Paxton, though. His office set up an internal email address (via The Barbed Wire: DLCourtorders@dps.texas.gov) to handle reports from DPS (Dept. of Public Safety) employees about any requests for gender changes by drivers, presumably so the AG could dream up some reason to further punish people requesting gender changes.
That didn't go as planned, though. Someone tipped off the rest of the internet and the internet responded appropriately, according to documents obtained by Austin's KUT News:
In response, the agency released more than 700 pages of emails.
It appears just one of the emails was an internal communication noting an employee had received a request to change the sex listed on a driver's license. The rest, more than 80 messages, were from people critical of the policy change, including hundreds of pages of what look like spam.
[...]
The records show that in the days following the policy change, the Department of Public Safety was signed up for PETA's newsletter and emails from the Krazy Coupon Lady. The address received emails from QueerMeNow, a gay pornography blog, and Lovehoney, a British company that sells adult toys and lingerie.
[...]
A half dozen emails were just copies of the Bee Movie script.
And there it is: the Bee Movie script - the ultimate proof that you've fucked around with the internet and found out. But there's plenty of other fun stuff in there: a request to ship a 2024 Bentley from Columbus, Ohio to Huntsville, Alabama, lots of emails describing the policy and its enforcers as evil" and good little Nazis," and this nod to another classic of a genre the Texas government and its AG are apparently intent on eradicating:
One email had the subject line, All Cowboys Are Gay."
The body read, what I said."
What's not included in the reporting or the document dump is the current status of the email address Paxton's office definitely would have preferred to have kept private. There's probably only one way to find out and/or get cited in future reporting on the spectacular implosion of the AG's internal feed my bigotry" hotline.
Unfortunately, the quietly changed drivers license policy is still active and still negatively affecting people. In August, Texas Monthly detailed the story of a Houston man who found himself stymied by the new law while trying to get his license changed - something he was denied despite being in possession of a court order giving him permission to legally change his name and gender.
After transitioning to female a few years ago-and changing all legal documents accordingly-he said he'd realized he would always be viewed as a second-class citizen." So he detransitioned, and in March he obtained a court order from a district court in Travis County to change his license back. But after a new policy was quietly rolled out last week via an internal email, prompted by the office of the Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Texas Department of Public Safety will no longer accept a court order as a basis to change a person's sex on their driver's license. Razavi's request was denied. I am a biological male," Razavi toldTexas Monthly.I'm six five with a beard and actual penis, but according to Ken Paxton, I am to remain legally a woman."
That's the ultimate irony. The law and ensuing DPS policy change are meant to do little more than allow bigots to force people to be identified as whatever gender the bigots decide they most resemble. Someone trying to get back to the limited existence Paxton considers to be normal" can't even make the bigots happy because the law says he's no longer allowed align his state ID with his biological gender.
And that's the thing about hate: it makes people stupid. That's why this form of hate is most often described as irrational." That's because it is. Nothing about it requires thought or introspection. All it requires from the hater is an equally irrational belief that someone else is undeserving of rights or respect. Intelligent people don't spend a lot of time hating. The idiots that run large parts of this country, however, do little else with their time.