I don’t know how true this is, or if it’s just a funny story. Years ago even before gay marriage even became a topic in mainstream media. I heard that a trans fem went to go get her ID changed from M to F. They refused to change it all the typical response. She got mad and well if they see me as M then I’ll dress like one. She took her top off and would walk around town topless. Cops would arrest her or try to write her tickets but she would go into Court and go my ID says M and men can walk around without a shirt, so what’s the problem. I think they eventually let her change her ID to F.
Again I don’t know if this is true just a funny story I heard a long time ago. Though it would be funny if it would happen today.
Better keep picking on less than 1% of the population instead of trying to solve the problems effecting everyone.
They’re intentionally focusing on the wrong 1%. Going after trans people is meant to serve as a distraction.
I would say they have us focusing on the wrong 1%. We should unite and go after the real problem.
I guess they ???could dress in reverse drag??? to drive and vote?
Fuck you Kansas.
Shit like this is why I no longer believe in the abolishment of death penalty.
It should be the opposite. This is the perfect example of why the death penalty should 100% be abolished. Right now they’re going after driver licenses and bathroom usage, but the slippery slope is very slippery. It won’t take much for them to make being trans an illegal offense punishable by death.
It won’t take much for them to make being trans an illegal offense punishable by death.
What they’ll do is make something like “the sexual abuse of children” punishable by death, but define being trans (probably verbiage would be “crossdressing”) within so many feet of a child as sexual abuse.
Then, when people try to argue against it, they can be like “oh, you want to protect pedophiles?”
They won’t go that far because they now have a vested interest in protecting pedophiles. They’ll just come out and say that being trans is illegal because it’s against god or something and that it’ll punishable by death. And guess what? They’ll get it away with it too just like how they’re getting away with this crap.
Okay, probably I can settle with absolute life in prison, if said prison is a solitary confinement without any access to their preferred religious materials and/or food.
If this is NOT another reason to study and read socialist theory, then I don’t know what is. Seriously! https://redsails.org/
Signed by a governor who legit looks like a transfem version of Elizabeth Warren.
Tsk tsk.
She vetoed this but the legislature managed to over ride her veto.
Also, tsk-tsk on you dragging her appearance into this. And in a way that as a transfem person, I personally find insensitive and gross.
I’m glad she tried to veto this. I apologize for the crass angle, but I’m pretty sure that if some Kansas yokel saw her coming out of a women’s room (and didn’t recognize her as the governor), they’d be harassing her and trying to get the payout.
That’s the other side of this problem, is that not only transgender people will be impacted, but also cisgender women who have masculine features.
Its whole intent is to harass pretty much any woman, regardless of their birth sex, unless they meet the same Barbie image that every Republican seems to think is the only way a “real” woman should look.
The point I was trying to make (while under the belief that she supported it) was that cis women who look like her would also be impacted.
I appreciate your apology, and agree that these kinds of policies hurt women who don’t measure up to patriarchal ideas of how a woman should look. Regardless of sex assigned at birth.
But she’s a good one and has been vetoing things like this. Unfortunately, the Kansas GOP has enough votes that they can override her.
My only comment about this might be bannable for violence reasons, so I’m just gonna be quiet.
I just changed mine to NB in my state. $20 to upgrade to real id at the same time.
We need a system that’s a lot more fairer and deals with the proletariat rather than the bourgeoisie. Luckily, there’s that system - it’s called socialism. Seriously!
Western democracy says you should tolerate fascists so they can crush you
Time to organize
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“We apologize for the inconvenience this causes you.”
Yes I’m sure you fucking do.
We apologize for the inconvenience
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.
In which case they sue, and the case gets run up to the ultra Maga supreme court who will of course be fair and impartial in their review before returning a verdict that favors conservatives.
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 :/
Yeah the US is pretty much a case study.
Europe isn’t immune either, by any means. The monopoly on violence will, unsurprisingly, be full of violent authoritarians, and the same will happen anywhere that authoritarians feel like they now have the upper hand
Europe isn’t immune either, by any means.
Feel rare to hear that expressed, but one of the side effects of our fall into fascism is that, like you say - we make for a good case study, and if it woke Europeans up a bit and that fall doesn’t happen over there, so much the better.
It definitely is a reminder that we cannot take democracy for granted. It is a constant struggle. And letting the oligarchs “play” with their Fox News lies and right-wing radio… that experiment shows that fascism and authoritarianism must be stamped out and not allowed to thrive as an “equal voice”.
We already have Slovakia, Hungary and Italy here, with Italy being ruled by literal neofascists – FdI is a direct descendant of Mussolini’s original Fascist Party. Finland is on its way to joining them, in Germany AfD is gaining popularity, RN is very popular in France and so on
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.
I don’t understand how any of this is legal
Part of it comes down to how driving is legally a privilege, but it’s also been made a legal requirement in many instances (such as living on a highway that disallows pedestrians) and a functional requirement in many others (have to walk past 5 miles of parking lots and take a long meandering path to get around the interstate along noisy, busy stroads just to get to any grocery store by foot for the most common example)
Sometimes in some places there’s half-assed policies in place to try to paper over the problem, such as free paratransit for disabled and elderly individuals that requires scheduling the ride days or weeks in advance, special driving permits for those who had their licenses revoked to be able to get to work, school and go shopping but restricts allowed driving hours and places to make it even more of a punishment, bus services that run only hourly on weekdays, stopping only at poorly marked stops located in built places no human would want to stand at for even a few minutes, etc
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
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.
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.
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”
Tshirtable
Instead of “identify as a fucking problem” it should say “identify as your fucking problem”
The cruelty is the point.
Oh, but they “apologize for the inconvenience”.
The DMV might actually be sorry about it. The governor (who oversees the DMV) vetoed the bill, but the legislature overrode her veto. If it was up to the governor, this law would have never been in place.
Should have just refused to send the notices. Make them try to remove her from office. Make them file suit. Make them send State Troopers to physically haul her out from behind the governor’s desk. If Kansas Republicans are going to try to take one more large step on the “genocide the people of whose existence we do not approve,” then there’s no level of resistance that isn’t appropriate, if you want to hang on to your humanity.
The point is also to disempower you and render you unable to resist extermination.
Within the next three years, we will either see a second American revolution or the mass execution of trans people who have done nothing wrong (though they will naturally be classified as sex offenders and felons).
We’re already engaged in the mass incarceration and extrajudicial murder of immigrants and dissenters. People seem reluctant to rebel.
