You don’t change the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War if you’re not planning on going to war. Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth and Stephen Miller and all of the other weak and pathetic fascists running the country absolutely love killing and hurting people. It’s their kink. This is definitely a time when kink shaming is more than appropriate, and yet they have no shame.
I’m not just talking about Iran, a country the U.S. just started bombing because the aforementioned blood-lusting freaks just felt like it, a situation that is getting worse by the minute. I’m also talking about the war against immigrants, the war against Black and brown people, the war against American cities like Minneapolis, the war against public education, the war against reproductive freedom, the war against democracy, the war against the media, the war against science and, of course, the war against transgender people.
The Republican Party’s cruel campaign against transgender people should terrify you, regardless of your gender identity. For one thing, it’s fucking immoral.
For another thing, did you not read the list of things this administration is waging war against? It’s a long, and incomplete, list. I know Republicans love war, but they are fighting too many at once and that was true before they decided that what the world needs now is more war in the Middle East — a war that appears to have no actual plan in place for what happens next.
And I have something to say to the “it’s a distraction” crowd. The Republican war against transgender people is not a distraction from anything. They aren’t intentionally harming transgender people to create a diversion. They’re doing it because intentionally harming transgender people is something they want to do.
Harming transgender people is not just a Trump administration thing, it’s a goal of the entire Republican Party. We’re not only seeing attacks on transgender rights, like access to healthcare, coming from the federal government. We’re seeing it at the state level, too.
Which brings me to Kansas, a state that has escalated the assault on transgender people literally overnight with the passage of Senate Bill 244.
SB244 might as well be called the “Push Transgender People Out of Public Life Act.”
According to the ACLU of Kansas, “Senate Bill 244 requires transgender people to use the restrooms and other sex-separated facilities in government buildings associated with their sex assigned at birth, while creating new civil and criminal penalties to enforce those restrictions.”
In other words, transgender people can be punished for daring to use the “wrong” restroom in a government building.
Perhaps more alarming is that SB244 “changes the rules regarding government IDs for transgender people. It prohibits transgender people from updating their driver’s licenses or state ID cards to reflect their gender, and also invalidates transgender people’s existing driver’s licenses, state IDs and birth certificates if those documents were issued in Kansas and reflect a gender different from a person’s sex at birth.”
Transgender people got letters in the mail dated Feb. 23 letting them know that beginning Feb. 26, their licenses would no longer be valid. They were told they needed to immediately “surrender” their ID and have a new one issued with the “correct” (read: wrong) gender marker. Three days. No grace period.
Journalist Erin Reed calls this “one of the most significant erosions of transgender civil rights in the United States to date.”
And there’s no reasonable justification for it. The only thing this accomplishes is forcibly outing trans people, invalidating their identities, and making life more difficult than it already is.
I mean, imagine if you got a letter in the mail saying that you had three days (and that’s only if you received the letter on the day it was dated and opened it right away, so most people probably had less time than that) to get down to the Secretary of State’s office or DMV to get a new license or you would no longer be able to legally drive. Could you do it? Would you be able to drop everything to make it happen? For many people, the answer is no.
And here Kansas is, asking transgender people to not just surrender their licenses — they’re asking them to surrender their very identities.
The ACLU is suing to stop enforcement of SB 244 “so that existing driver’s licenses remain valid while this lawsuit is ongoing.” But who knows how the court will rule or how long that will take.
Bottom line: Trans rights are human rights and trying to eradicate transgender people is a human wrong. Full stop. That is not up for debate. At least not for anyone with critical thinking skills and compassion for other human beings. Which, unfortunately, does not describe anyone currently in charge.