Kansas Bill Will Strip Driver’s Licenses from Every Trans Resident Who Changed Gender
Leading Off: As Kansas passes a bathroom bill, another bill that will invalidate the driver’s license of every trans resident has been deemphasized in the coverage. Also, Trump’s Department of Education says San Jose State violated Title IX by letting a trans athlete play, and Texas A&M eliminates their gender studies major.
by Assigned Media
The trans news doesn’t stop coming, and most of it is bad. Here are three stories from the past few days that show how Republican attacks on trans life continue to escalate.
In Kansas, more than a bathroom bill is at stake for transgender residents as the extreme right legislature jam through a bill to mass-invalidate the driver’s licenses of every trans person in the state. The bill, HB246, declares that all driver’s licenses out of step with the state’s definition of man and woman are invalid, and instructs the director of vehicles of Kansas to identify every license issued to a trans person and send written notice that the license must be surrendered and reissued. Driving with a license that has been canceled, suspended, or revoked is a misdemeanor in Kansas.
The bill institutes an extreme and novel punishment of transgender residents for continuing to live their lives as normal, and the legality of stripping people of legal ID in this way is questionable. However, there has been little coverage of the measure because the legislature paired it with one of the most extreme bans on trans people using public restrooms in the entire country. The bathroom ban has been covered in local news stories and by the Erin in the Morning newsletter, which mentioned but did not focus on the driver’s license changes or their potential impact on trans Kansans.
In the Trump era, women’s equality has been repurposed to attack the trans community. Last Wednesday, the Department of Education announced they’d deemed San Jose State University in violation of Title IX, which was intended to protect women from discrimination. The discrimination, in this case, was San Jose State allegedly allowing a transgender woman to participate in athletics with other women students.
The administration alleges the women’s volleyball team includes a trans player. The university has never acknowledged having a trans player, though one national media outlet claims to have confirmed it. The administration has demanded San Jose State endorse the regime’s definition of gender, ban trans women from athletics, and apologize individually to every women’s volleyball player who competed against them.
In Texas, anti-trans politics are an excuse to dismantle academic feminism as Texas A&M moves from draconian speech restrictions targeting mentions of gender identity to dismantling their women and gender studies department.
In the early days of anti-trans activism, trans rights were frequently claimed to conflict with women’s rights, however the antifeminist turn of the anti-trans movement has been long predicted, including on this very news site.
According to reporting in the 19th, the department currently has 25 students seeking a major and 31 seeking a minor.
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