• by Tanya Gazdik , January 31, 2024

Infographic drawn from the report Mapping LGBT Equality in America.

Florida residents can no longer elect to change their gender on their driver’s license.

That’s according to a memo sent to state officials by the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles and obtained by CNN. 

Existing statutes dictate that Florida’s Department of Motor Vehicles can only issue a replacement license when a license or permit is “lost, stolen, or when there is a subsequent change in the licensee’s name, address or restrictions.”

“Furthermore, misrepresenting one’s gender, understood as sex, on a driver license constitutes fraud … and subjects an offender to criminal and civil penalties, including cancellation, suspension, or revocation of his or her driver license,” the memo states.

Nathan Bruemmer, a transgender attorney and president of the LGBTQ+ Democratic Caucus in Florida, said the new policy will affect “every aspect” of daily life for transgender people in Florida.

“Florida is rescinding a process without notice after years and they are adding insult to injury by adding a civil and criminal penalty,” Bruemmer said in a statement to CNN.

NCTE spokesperson Ash Orr said the new ban adds to Florida's long list of harmful policies that target the transgender people.

“Access to identity documents is crucial in daily life, impacting activities like work, voting, travel, and engagement with government institutions," Orr said in a Tuesday statement, per USA Today. "Ensuring everyone, including transgender people, have accurate official documents, such as driver's licenses, is vital for upholding our institutional rights.”

State Republican lawmakers are pushing a bill requiring driver's licenses to display the carrier's sex at birth rather than their gender identity, according to a separate USA Today story. 

“The state has been pushing for this change for some time, with bills in the state house and senate that tie gender to ‘biological sex’ — a concept that, no matter how you define it, doesn’t split humanity into two unimpeachable boxes (the folks that cry ‘It’s basic biology’ clearly never took advanced biology,)" according to Jalopnik, which also gets credit for first using the catchy (but sad) headline on this story. 

The department sent the memo to county tax collectors last week. The change appears to have been made without public input, according to theTampa Bay Times. 

The memo 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.

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.”

Alejandra Caraballo, an attorney and trans advocate who publicized the memo on X, said the wording appears to apply the new policy to trans people who changed their gender marker even before the change.

“This was the latest example of a state agency under the DeSantis Administration bypassing the lawmaking process to pass rules affecting trans people,” according to Axios. “The state medical board banned gender-affirming care for trans youth months before lawmakers codified a similar ban. And the Agency for Health Care Administration barred Medicaid policies from covering gender-affirming medical care in a process far outside the norm for the agency.”

Florida joins Kansas in fully banning transgender residents from updating their gender markers on their driver's licenses. In Kansas, a temporary order is in place banning changes while an ongoing legal battle between the Kansas Department of Revenue and the Republican attorney general plays out to determine whether that policy will stick, the Associated Press reported.