Top 1% of the of 1%. With the highest passing. /s
“We apologize for the inconvenience this causes you.”
How nice.
“We apologize for the fact that you live under a state legislature that doesn’t respect your humanity.”
First they came for…
Sounds like voter suppression to me as they push the SAVE act.
I’m not trans and keen to understand how this impacts a trans person.
My. Immediate thought was it’s intentionally leaving out the part that says you’ll be issued with a replacement so won’t stop you from driving so no biggie right?
However, that’s diminishing the cruelty of it - it’s about the emotional trauma from a government forcing you to officially identify as something you’ve fought your whole life not to be.
More than that it’s about forcing every trans person to be outed every time they show their id. If you’re a trans person with passing privilege congrats now you have to think ‘do I feel safe being openly trans here’ every time you buy alcohol or nicotine.
Oh wow, that’s a really good point that I’d missed. Thanks for helping me understand the full threat from this.
My. Immediate thought was it’s intentionally leaving out the part that says you’ll be issued with a replacement so won’t stop you from driving so no biggie right?
Nope, it says you’ll be issued a new one once it is surrendered, but it also says that it would be invalid immediately, so would not be legal to drive with.
Fantastic point, I’d missed the nuance of this. That gap would be a significant concern without all of the more heinous implications of this action.
won’t stop you from driving so no biggie right?
Right?
…riiight?
What the fuck do the genitals I had at birth have to do with my ability to drive a car?
Republicans are obsessed with genitals. Maybe if we all send them a picture they can get it out of their system and finally grow up.
Good idea, let’s all try it. Think we should send a pic of our assholes too?
Why send them pictures of the US government?
If you read the text in front of you, you’d realize they do not think your gender affects your ability to drive. They just think the license is invalid due to the wrong gender being listed.
Why would it invalidate the licence? They were utterly fine with it up until now so what’s changed?
They want to fuck with trans people because they hate them. The thing that changed is they feel confident enough to do it now and that no one will act against them.
If you had read the subtext you would have realized they are transphobic
something someshit uh trans sports
these fucks do not understand human rights and won’t stop with their bullshit until they’re voted out of office.
Unfortunately, Kansastan.
So you can appeal this, but it does not have any effect on anything, so you in fact cannot appeal this.
You all should move to Russia for better quality of life.
Current Russia is also transphobic.
I used to run through kansas twice a week on us-54. Lmao not no more
The “your driver license is invalid immediately” is super fucking infuriating, especially in a country where without a driving license means being unemployable
Fucking scum, a driving license has nothing to do with sex. It is meant to prove that the cardholder is able to drive a vehicle or not.
Luckily I live in a continent where the cardholder sex isn’t mentioned at all in the driving license (eu directive of 2006)
Luckily I live in a continent where the cardholder sex isn’t mentioned at all in the driving license (eu directive of 2006)
Don’t be so bold, the EU is turning right and has been for the last few years. Sweden’s deporting kids to Iran without their families, for instance. That pisses me off more than trans adult muricans losing their driving licenses.
its infuriating because it is a “silent” attempt to kill
Tshirtable
Instead of “identify as a fucking problem” it should say “identify as your fucking problem”
I wonder how many billions the USA has been wasted on crap legislation just like this.
I would think it would be worse for the license holder AND whatever law agency to be listed as “M” when they look “F”, and tie up a lot of resources over nothing but another power trip.
So now you must hire a “medical professional” to exam and of course they will be paid by the state.
Then they’ll need to make a new law enforcement division with a clever acronym, like T.E.D.
Then scanners at bathrooms with attending physician on call
Minimum wage is seven dollars an hour. Union membership is now mostly government employees and down to 10%.
STOCK MARKET 50K THOUGH
Removed by mod
And you don’t see the glaring contradictions in your beliefs? You complain about non-passing trans people with one breath. With the next, you condemn minors receiving gender-affirming healthcare! The entire reason there’s a desire to not wait until kids are 18 is to avoid years of the wrong sex puberty that can make it very hard for trans people to assimilate into their gender as an adult!
Critical thinking is dead.
I think the trans movement dug a deep hole for itself when it promoted transition surgery for minors.
We didn’t. Noone is even advocating for that. That is 100% a right-wing straw-man.
That works both ways though, when an “F” on the license is for someone who is 6’3" with quarterback shoulders and five-o’clock shadow.
Exactly, and now there’s gonna be a ton of beardy, muscly men who are forced to revert to an “F” on their licenses.
I think the trans movement dug a deep hole for itself when it promoted transition surgery for minors.We didn’t. Noone is even advocating for that. That is 100% a right-wing straw-man.
I guess puberty-blockers are less invasive…
Just say your biology education ended at middle school. It’s okay.
It boils my fucking blood that my tax dollars are paying for this
Removed by mod
Fed isn’t revoking current passports. I’ve heard stories of renewals being returned to natal sex (and confiscated, but fewer incidents of that), but not “your current identification is invalid and you need to replace it ASAP.”
Do you realize how terrifying that would be? Get pulled over for a burned out tail light, your drivers license doesn’t count any more (realistically - how quickly could you clear out a day to visit the DMV?)
You can’t vote till you replace it? Kansas is probably following some ALEC/P26 playbook, and other states will follow. Closer to midterms likely.
I occasionally like to travel to rural areas. I used to spend a great deal of time volunteering in rural areas. Places where an incongruity between appearance and classification could be harmful. Minimum is being unable to grab a beer perhaps, but i don’t think it takes much imagination for other outcome. I guess that’s how it’s personally different.
Why do licenses need gender or sex at all?
Do you realize how terrifying that would be? Get pulled over for a burned out tail light, your drivers license doesn’t count any more (realistically - how quickly could you clear out a day to visit the DMV?)
Especially in the US, where a lot of things are car-centric. Sure, you could drive to the DMV, but your licence is invalid, so you’d be driving without a licence.
“We apologize for the inconvenience this causes you.”
Yes I’m sure you fucking do.
If they try this shit in my state, I’d fucking sue.
I had surgery BECAUSE it would let me change my drivers license. I paid $5500 as a broke college student because I was getting turned down for jobs with that stupid “F.”
I don’t understand how any of this is legal. The constitution prohibits “ex post facto” laws - how can you revoke someone’s documentation when they complied with the laws as they were at the time?
I don’t understand how any of this is legal
That’s the thing - It’s not. They don’t give a shit, and the judicial system isn’t doing anything about it
And even if they did, it would take months, if not years, to resolve. Until then people will either be disenfranchised and can’t vote or forced to update their ID’s, which could also take months of paperwork to resolve.
how any of this is legal. The constitution
The problem is that you respect and believe in words. The people currently in charge could give two fucks. Ultimately, words only have the power that we give them, so when those in charge ignore the Constitution, then the Contitution has no power.
I have severe ADHD. It’s funny in a way because when I was younger, I tried to understand the rules of my employers and follow them. And yet I still lost jobs. In part because of issues related to ADHD specifically, but in part because what companies SAY the rules are is not what the rules are. If you’ve worked in a corporate environment, you know that there’s go-to people for things. And while there’s official processes (or maybe even not), what ACTUALLY happens is that someone goes to the person who can do something and asks them to do it, and generally they do, and that’s like 75% of how business actually runs.
In the same way, there are rules and decorum and traditions in politics and revolve around the Constution and various bodies of legislature, et cetera. And so there’s nothing that ACTUALLY forces anyone to follow any of that except voluntary compliance or physical threat because policing bodies enforce things.
This is why the rich are free, largely, from most crimes. They aren’t enforced. And this is how our democracy crumbled. The Constitution hasn’t been repealed. It doesn’t have to be. It is simply ignored. Worse, those who claim to follow it shit on it and ignore it and throw it out.
or physical threat because policing bodies enforce things.
And unfortunately those kinds of organisations are full of people who tend to lean very heavily towards authoritarianism, so once the winds shift enough you’ll suddenly find that the people who are supposed to be enforcing the law, well, don’t.
As we have seen in recent months. heh :/
I’m currently outside the US but I’m pulling my hair out trying to renew my passport. I don’t even care what’s on it. The Nazi bastards don’t give a fuck, the cruelty is the point
I’ve been trying to revive my childhood passport from my birth country since I fully expect passports to be next
The constitution prohibits “ex post facto” laws - how can you revoke someone’s documentation when they complied with the laws as they were at the time?
I agree with you generally that this should be illegal, but it probably isn’t.
It definitely isn’t ex post facto; this is not a law that punishes anyone from a legal perspective, it merely changes the requirements for a certain privilege (the ability to drive a vehicle). If it declared these licenses invalid before the date of the law (which could carry punishments for illegally operating vehicles), then it would be ex post facto.
Another way to put it is that it simply makes a certain action illegal which was previously legal, and laws do that sort of thing all the time. Consider that in the US you didn’t need a driver’s license in order to drive at all until 1913. The NJ law requiring drivers licenses also “revoked” someone’s privilege even though they complied with the laws previously, requiring them to get a permit from then on. But, since it didn’t introduce any punishments for not having the permit before it was introduced, it wasn’t ex post facto.
Of course the law is also clearly discriminatory, but US’s extremely limited anti-discrimination laws are likely not broad enough to be applied here.
The current events should awaken many people to the sad fact that US laws and its entire legal system exists primarily to protect the wealthy and the powerful from everyone else; all other functions are secondary. As such, many horrible, immoral, and unjust things are legal under US laws, and many others will be twisted into being legal by the supreme court.
It’s true that this isn’t ex post facto, but in a sane interpretation of the law it would be discrimination against a protected class; a woman who was assigned female at birth grts preferential treatment under the law with respect to a woman who was not.
Unfortunately we live in an age of madness.
This letter reads to me like it is someone from the Kansas executive branch (run by Democrat Governor Laura Kelly) legitimately apologizing that they are bound by Republican made, veto-overridden law to cause this inconvenience, but maybe I’m being too generous
That could be the case, I suppose. If they really wanted to be assholes about it, they could just not send anything at all. This at least explains how the recipient is effected and what they can/need to do
Not only that, but bare in mind that most government employees are there to do a job. They don’t always agree with the laws they have to enforce and sometimes they will make it as challenging as possible for fascist ideas like this go through.
Complaining to them is like complaining to the checkout cashier at your grocery store that the prices are too high.
That’s how I read this, too. The government isn’t a monolith that just agrees with every law they have to follow. They do have to follow the law until it is challenged, though. Hopefully courts in KS knock this down.
Nah, this is bipartisan cruelty. The Democratic governor maintained a list of trans people who changed their markers. How do you think they were able to send out these letters so fast? They already had a list of anyone that had changed their gender marker. That list was created on the order of a Democratic governor.
No. It is GOP cruelty. Nothing “bipartisan” about it. From a different article:
The new law takes effect on Thursday. Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed the measure, but the Legislature’s GOP supermajorities overrode it last week as Republican state lawmakers across the U.S. have pursued another round of measures to roll back transgender rights.
Kansas’ new law enjoyed nearly unanimous GOP support. It is the latest success in what has become an annual effort to further roll back transgender rights by Republicans in statehouses across the U.S., bolstered by policies and rhetoric from President Donald Trump’s administration.
Kelly supports transgender rights, but GOP lawmakers have overridden her vetoes three of the past four years. (emphases mine)
Nothing ambiguous about it. I would also draw your attention to the first line of the above letter itself:
House Substitute for Senate Bill 244, enacted by the Kansas Legislature overriding Governor Kelly’s veto, requires Kansas-issued drivers’ licenses and identification cards to reflect the credential holder’s sex at birth and directs the Division of Vehicles to comply with K.S.A. 77-207.
Generally speaking, governors do not personally compile healthcare-related lists.
Any such list would be assembled by and come through the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, and with the Kansas state GOP supermajority passing the legislation making such lists mandatory, there would not be much the very obviously trans-friendly governor could do.I genuinely do not see how you can lay GOP group evil at the feet on the one person clearly trying to do what she can to stop it.
It’s almost like you don’t want the GOP to get full credit for what the GOP supermajority is doing in Kansas to trans people.
EDITED to correct myself and add source
It’s almost like you’re completely ignorant of this and are "umm aktually"ing an actual trans person who pays attention to this stuff!
No shit the law was passed by a Republican legislature. And yes, the law was vetoed by the governor. But maybe you’re just one of those Blue MAGA types that assumes Dems can do no wrong. But a list of trans people in the state already existed. And that list wasn’t created as a result of this law. It was created by policies of the Vital Records office, which the governor controls. In fact, Kansas, with its Democratic governor, had a pre-made list of trans people ready to go, which not even Texas and Florida had!
https://transitics.substack.com/p/kansas-secretly-spent-years-making
Whether by malice or ignorance matters little. Under the watch of a Democratic governor, the state went further than any other Republican state in having a records system that could instantly create a list of trans Kansas residents.
Yes, Republicans are the primary antagonists of trans folks. But Democrats are truthfully not much better. In fact, there are Democratic attorneys general in more than a dozen states that are currently ignoring their own state laws and refusing to enforce anti-discrimination laws. Many hospitals and clinics have been complying in advance with Trump’s illegal executive orders targeting trans healthcare, stopping services for children and adults. Doing so is a direct violation of anti-discrimination laws that LGBT activists spent decades fighting to pass. But the laws mean nothing if the attorneys general aren’t willing to actually enforce them.
A lot of Democrats have decided that sticking up for trans people is simply politically inconvenient. They won’t actively try to pass persecutory laws, but they won’t lift a finger to fight back against them either. The Kansas governor didn’t want the optics of explicitly signing a piece of bigoted legislation, but she also didn’t lift a finger to protect trans people. The very agencies she’s in charge of designed their records system so that it would be easy to find trans people, and it never occurred to the Democratic governor to try and do something about this.
So yes, this is bipartisan cruelty. Don’t be Blue MAGA and assume your side is innocent.
But maybe you’re just one of those Blue MAGA types that assumes Dems can do no wrong.
Far from it. After Kamala, and the Senate cave-in last year, and all they have NOT done, I’ll never vote non-screamingly progressive Dem again. The Dems are not even remotely sin-free here. And thank you for the additional information; you’re right, I did not know that.
But it’s not as black and white as you paint it. As tired as you must personally be of not having the supposedly good people do enough, I am tired of seeing people who are actually trying to do the right thing in their given circumstances constantly shat upon for not doing it ALL, while the people most guilty of all these egregious errors get a complete pass, or just a passing nod, as if it is up to the genuinely well-intentioned among us to corral all evil and somehow not up to the evildoers themselves to cut it the fuck out. I don’t know what kind of shit this governor has gotten for her pro-trans actions and vetos, but it’s definitely non-zero in a red state like Kansas, and I would not be surprised if she’s gotten death threats over her pro-trans stance.
Driving an infinitely fine line between good and perfect helps no one. The governor was at least working a veto, or trying to. Did she even know what her appointed secretary was doing? And it wasn’t just the Kansas Office of Vital Statistics (OVS) starting trans tracking in 2019; according to the blog you linked, the Kansas Division of Vehicles has been tracking trans people since 2007.
Representatives for the Division of Vehicles confirmed that, since legalizing driver’s license updates in 2007, the DOV has also tracked trans people. Like the OVS, the DOV created an internal marker that is specific to the process Kansas called “gender reclassification.” Similar to the vital records system, this trans-specific flag gives the DOV the ability to quickly create a list of trans people—an ability it recently utilized to send the revocation letters.
So the list that sent the letters came from the Dept of Vehicles itself, and was started a dozen years prior to Kelly attaining office.
If someone’s openly on my “side” I’m not going to shit on them for what they might not even personally be aware of, especially when death threats for being pro-trans have become the norm for public figures.
As for me, my own personal “side” is not MAGA or anti-MAGA, though these days it works out anti 100% of the time. My own personal “side” is 100% pro-people: living the way they want to live, loving the way they want to love, inhabiting the bodies they want to inhabit, and to support anyone who I think is at least trying to stand up for that, however imperfect and insufficient their efforts are at this moment in time.
And no. The current hostility toward anyone of a different identity is NOT bipartisan. It is primarily GOP. And while not all Dems are on board, that’s where the majority of your supporters are, because they sure as fuck aren’t on the GOP side, and as you have read, it is still the Kansas GOP supermajority that is rolling this shit out for Kansas like a monster truck without brakes. For all the hairs you’ve so carefully split, you still haven’t convinced me otherwise. But again, thank you for the additional information: on that I do stand corrected, and I do appreciate you taking the time and trouble to correct me on it.
EDITED to add blog quote and to remove unnecessarily inflammatory language
They might as well have said “THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER”
we apologize the inconvenience this causes you
Whenever you see this line, anywhere, you know that they’re saying “fuck you and what are you going to do about it, eh?”
I mean, we’re 5 steps away from eugenics, and we’we sowwy for the inconvenience!
The goal is literally to inspire acts of violence by trans people. You can only persecute a community so much before the more unstable elements in that community start lashing out violently against anyone they can blame. That’s the goal here. They’re actively trying to create trans mass shooters. You demonize and persecute a minority. When some return your violence, you use that to justify further persecution.
I’m not trans, but I’m considering it. As someone posted above, respect my trans homies, or I’ll identify as a fucking problem.
I am patient and intelligent. And very. Very. Fucking. Angry.
I cannot be alone.
You’re not alone. And there are people in less persecuted demographics who should, can, and are willing to go to bat for the trans community.
Please stay safe and keep exploring you.
I think it’s likely sincere. Lots of space between apologies for “the inconvenience” and the more traditional “any inconvenience.”
The bureaucrat who had to write up this letter letting people know their IDs were going to be insta-invalidated was not a party to passing the law, and probably doesn’t like telling people things like this.
