Ilektra A. | Red Phoenix correspondent | Oregon-
Transgender Kansas residents began receiving lettersfrom the state informing them that their driver’s licenses would be invalidated and that they must surrender them immediately, to be replaced by ones with incorrect gender markers on them. This escalation comes after a repressive anti-trans law, SB 244, was passed in the Midwestern state in January requiring trans people’s identification to match their assigned gender at birth, under the guise of “protecting women and girls,” and making it illegal for trans people to use sex-segregated spaces like public restrooms, locker rooms, rape crisis centers, and more.
The passing of these laws are a clear message to the transgender people of Kansas that in the eyes of the state, they are not welcome in public life anymore. But, it is crucial for those reading this article to recognize that these civil restrictions are not in the slightest actually intended to protect women and girls, but rather, in the inverse, meant to further curtail their rights to bodily autonomy and self-determination.
According to SB 244, Kansans’ driver’s licenses must now match their gender assigned at birth, and if they don’t, they are immediately considered invalid and must be turned in to the state to be replaced. As if this wasn’t disconcerting enough, the letters, which residents only began receiving on Monday, February 23, only gave recipients until Thursday the 26th before their licenses’ validity was nullified. Some people even received the notices only a day prior to the date the rule goes into effect, making it impossible to comply with the ruling in time. Of course, driving without a valid license in Kansas is a class B misdemeanor, punishable by a fine of up to $1,000 and potentially 6 months in jail.
What’s more, Kansas forces transgender inmates to be housed in jail facilities that correspond with their assigned gender, not their actual gender, further exposing them to heightened risks of discrimination, physical abuse and sexual assault.
In addition to essentially making it illegal overnight for trans Kansans to drive, the bill allows those using multi-occupant sex-segregated spaces like public restrooms to report people whom they suspect may not “belong” there to the authorities, and seek legal damages amounting to $1,000. This effectively grants anyone the legal authority to, for lack of a better term, “bounty hunt” for trans people using public restrooms, giving monetary incentives to people to ruin trans people’s lives, subjecting them to unwarranted harassment, violence, and potential legal troubles if they cannot “prove” that they “belong” in the given restroom.
Now that the state is making trans residents turn in their licenses for incorrect ones, the road is paved for heightened repression, danger, and exclusion from public life. Transgender people will be forced to out themselves as trans in many situations from using a public restroom to any other instances requiring ID verification, such as purchasing alcohol and tobacco, entering bars, opening bank accounts, and more.
Make no mistake, this law and others passed by the pedophilic capitalist class, which it claims are for the “protection of women and girls” (don’t laugh!) are actually designed to achieve the opposite. Rather, their true aim is to further restrict not just trans people’s, but todo people’s bodily autonomy and ability to make informed decisions regarding their own personal health, thereby setting the stage for returning our society to a prior, more repressive era where women had very little agency of the course of their own lives, other than for being homemakers and producing the next generation of workers to be exploited for profit.
We must under no circumstances allow these blatantly reactionary and fascistic violations of trans people’s rights to a life of happiness, dignity, safety, respect, and self-determination progress any further than they already have. We must continue to organize and educate our communities, our neighbors, and the broader working class to push back against these incursions, protect our trans and queer comrades and friends, and build a strong and militant labor movement that has the concrete ability and power to enact real, revolutionary change towards a society that works for everyone.