Illinois is facing obstacles in its implementation of the gender "X" option on residents' identification cards, as state law enforcement claims rolling out the new option is harder than state officials are making it out to be.
The state passed a law in 2019 that opened the door for nonbinary Illinoisans to select "X" as their gender on driver's licenses and other state IDs. The Illinois secretary of state's office originally projected the option would not take effect until 2024 to allow agencies time to update their systems to accommodate the gender marker.
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Now, the office has determined it is "ready to launch" the measure and is expressing frustration at several entities, including law enforcement and healthcare, for being ill-prepared to implement the gender "X" designation.
However, state police argue that it could not make adjustments to its internal systems without clear directions from the secretary of state's office, which only came recently.
State police spokeswoman Melaney Arnold told the Chicago Tribune that the gender "X" change will affect the LEADS database, an information sharing system that pulls data from driver's licenses and criminal history records from the secretary of state.
A separate vendor will need to program LEADS databases used by other law enforcement agencies to recognize and accept the gender "X" option, Arnold said.
"This is an oversimplification as these changes will take several months to complete,” Arnold said. “Every state’s system is ‘wired’ differently so this may be easier for some states compared to others.”
Court systems will also be affected by this change, and state police will need to make changes to its Criminal History Records Information and its data on criminal court outcomes. Livescan fingerprint machines will also need to be updated to accept the gender "X" option, Arnold said.
Chris Bonjean, a spokesman for the Administrative Office of the Illinois Courts, told the Chicago Tribune that there is already an "unknown" gender option for parties involved in court cases. Now, under the law change, Bonjean said the "unknown" option will need to be expanded to include the gender "X" designation.
The administrative office will need 90 days to update their systems with this change, Bonjean said, as well as time to relay the changes to other courts across Illinois.
“The secretary of state and Illinois State Police have indicated they are working toward identifying the impact of these updates,” Bonjean said in an email. “The AOIC is assisting with facilitating and coordination of implementation between the courts and the state agencies.”
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Still, lawmakers who supported the 2019 law are questioning the delay in the measure's rollout. They believe either the changes should have been made already or a plan should have been in place once the secretary of state's office was ready to move forward.
"These agencies who are coming in with ninth-hour complaints were well aware of this bill when it passed and should’ve been prepared to implement it all along, and so they need to be entering hyperspeed and getting prepared if they have not been doing the work all along,” said Democratic state Rep. Anne Stava-Murray, who sponsored the gender marker legislation.