Mississippi passes restrictive transgender driver’s license law

The Mississippi Legislature has approved a bill that would bar transgender people from changing the sex designation on new driver’s licenses except in narrow circumstances, embedding a new restriction into state law as part of a broader immigration-related measure.

Keep up with the latest in LGBTQ+ news and politics. Sign up for The Advocate's email newsletter.

Both chambers of the Legislature passed the bill on March 31. The measure limits driver’s licenses to legal U.S. residents, creates special markers for noncitizens, and says Mississippi will not recognize licenses issued by other states to undocumented immigrants.

Tucked into the bill is a provision requiring that newly issued Mississippi licenses list only a person’s sex as assigned at birth, effectively preventing most transgender residents from updating their documents to reflect their gender identity.

“No change may be made to this designation, except for a correction of a scrivener’s error, a correction in the case of a misidentification of the individual’s sex at birth due to a verifiable disorder of a sex development condition, or a correction of a license that has previously been voluntarily altered to record a sex other than the sex of the person as previously recorded at birth,” the bill reads.

Related: Kansas immediately revokes transgender residents’ driver’s licenses

Related: 21 states now limit transgender people’s bathroom use, with criminal penalties in three

The legislation now heads to Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican who has repeatedly backed anti-transgender measures, including laws restricting gender-affirming care and transgender participation in school sports.

Democrats have urged Reeves to veto the bill, arguing that the driver’s license provision is unrelated to roadway safety and unnecessarily targets transgender Mississippians. In an op-ed published by Mississippi Today, state Sen. Rod Hickman, a Democrat, called the “sex at birth” language the bill’s “most troubling aspect,” arguing that it serves no legitimate public safety purpose.

“It is a rigid mandate that ignores reality, ignores evidence and ignores the human impact of what it requires the state to do,” he wrote. “There has been no showing that allowing individuals to have identification that reflects who they are creates any safety risk. This provision does not prevent fraud. It does not assist law enforcement in any meaningful way. It does not make a single Mississippian safer.”

Related: Is Texas using driver's license data to track transgender residents?

Supporters of the measure say the restriction is necessary to preserve what they describe as accurate state identification records. But Mississippi Sen. Chad McMahan, one of the bill’s Republican sponsors, said it was important to have “accurate” licenses for public safety.

“It can be a matter of life and death as to whether a physician knows a person’s proper sex,” he wrote on Facebook. “The most reliable way for a hospital to verify this is to refer to a driver’s license, which a person is more likely to be carrying than a birth certificate, if they are in an accident.”