This Kansas license law pissed me off so much I had to start a blog to write about it

Kansas's state legislature just invalidated 1,600 licenses and 1,800 birth certificates belonging to trans people.

The new law, effective today, makes it so that if your gender marker on your state documents does not match the sex you were assigned at birth, then that document is no longer valid. In order to get a new license, trans people need to go to the DMV, surrender their old one, and pay for a new one that misgenders them.

This law provided no grace period, and if a trans person is caught driving with their now-invalidated license, even if they are driving to the DMV, they will be fined and/or arrested for driving with a suspended license.

And that isn't even everything. The ramifications of this law will cascade outward, and the consequences will be far reaching. But the complexity of the cruelty is the point.

Women arrested under this new law will be placed in prisons with men. And trans women in male prisons are often are raped, physically assaulted, and even murdered at rates far above the average for American prison systems (averages which are, by the way, still some of the highest in the world).

There is zero ideological difference between this and laws that enabled the Nazis to build and operate death camps in Germany. The fascists have simply obfuscated the mechanisms by which this is happening. The goal is the same, and it is also the goal of all those laws that various states are passing that make it harder for trans people to access life-saving gender-affirming care: the eradication of trans people from society.

But trans people are inherent to society. They have always existed, and further, they will always exist. But laws like this are designed to be a death by a thousand cuts, and that is why they are so insidious, especially today. Because society's attention is so fragmented, with our focus constantly being strained in all directions, the true implications of laws like this are lost on most people. Most won't even know this law passed, and if they do, they will only understand it on a surface level. And on the surface, it sounds bad, but it doesn't sound like, "Sending people to death camps," bad, and that is the point.

The end result is the same, but the mechanisms by which it is accomplished are far harder for the average person to grasp. And it is only starting with trans people. It always starts with laws that affect a minority, in ways that most people don't care about. And the fascists do it one by one. Then, if you wait long enough, and enough people who are "different" from you are gone, then eventually they start looking at you. Suddenly your eyes are too dark, your skin isn't the right shade of white, you aren't able bodied enough.

And then you're gone, too.

(The attached article is an interview with Juniper, a trans woman impacted by this new law, because I think it's important to hear voices from the communities being targeted. Credit to Evan Urquhart of Assigned Media for his reporting)

https://www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-news/kansas-trans-woman-license-invalidated-overnight-no-notice-given

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I have never written a blog post before. I have never had a blog before. This is rough as hell because I'm not an experienced writer, I don't do this professionally, and I'm not versed in proper blog etiquette or whatever. This literally started as a draft in my notes app and grew beyond the scope of that, so here we are. There aren't any citations (there probably should be) and there isn't any editing. Sorry about that. But I just had to yell somewhere, and the digital void of blogging felt as good a place as any.