Last Thursday, the Kansas State legislature passed SB 244, overriding a veto by Governor Laura Kelly and enshrining anti-trans law as unhinged in its fury as it is disheveled in structure. Here at Defector, we are committed to explaining incredibly stupid shit so that it can be comprehended by smart people such as yourselves. As a Defector subscriber, you likely hold a law degree, but that won't really help you understand this mess. To aid the process, please doff your thinking cap and replace it with this tasteful Kansas City Chiefs hat. Oh dear. Well yes, you do look ready to understand this now, just go ahead and ...
Oouughhhh, my head hurts. So, uh, what exactly is this law trying to do?
This law essentially functions as a wishlist for a Republican party that has a super-majority and a thoroughly busted local democratic process. The spirit of it is that anyone who had trans'd their sex on their driver's license would have their license instantly invalidated, and also that nobody can use a public bathroom except for the one that corresponds with their "sex at birth." The latter would be enforced by deputizing citizens to act as genital-investigator (or dick-dick, if you prefer) toward anyone in the bathroom with them that they feel ought not be there, and paying said dicks for convictions. If these snitches fail to secure the conviction bag, or find their suspected bathroom bandit on private property, this law would still also empower the rat fucks to sue in civil court.
Jesus! That seems like several different genres of rotten. How is that all the same law?
As reported at Erin In The Morning, this law was a product of a process known as "gut and go." Basically, Kansas legislators claim that due to a busy legislative session, they are sometimes forced to heavily amend or combine bills together in an honorable effort to give proper consideration to all the ideas that they are supposed to be voting on in a session, especially later on in the session.
Ah, so this bill was one of these late-introduced Franken-bills...
Oh, no, it was introduced on the first day of this year's session in the state house, then repackaged in a different bill in the senate after all the shitty press it got, likely as a deliberate attempt to skirt public opposition. Sorry, I wasn't clear there.
So this was the plan all along?
Yeah, sure looks that way.
No offense, but why would any trans person still be in Kansas, anyway?
Statistically, trans people usually occur in the population at a rate of around 1 in 100. When this law passed, the state government sent letters to everyone who had previously trans'd their sex on their drivers license to inform them their licenses are now invalid with no grace period, which apparently was a mailing list of only "about 300" people. Now, 3 million people admit to residing in the state of Kansas; by the math, you'd expect there to be around 30,000 trans people among them. This could imply that 99 percent of the trans people you would expect to occur there have either left the state or have not changed their legal sex markers. Granted, various governmental jackasses have put up numerous roadblocks to prevent those changes from happening in the past decade, but...
Wait, hang on, sorry ... you said they're keeping a list of people in the marginalized class that they are making into criminals?
Well, to be fair, if you are convinced that trans people are a group of fraudsters and sexual predators, it sort of makes some sense to keep a list.
Will this thwart fraudsters and sexual predators?
I hate to point it out, but rapists get convicted like two percent of the time, it appears that child sex trafficking is a great networking opportunity for the upwardly mobile, and all you have to do to get away with fraud is suck up to the president, who is at best a freelance sexual predator and fraudster but also just happens to be or have been buddies with a lot of folks who are organized about it. The downsides of being trans are miles worse, turns out, than acting on any of the worst, most rotten antisocial impulses you might possibly possess. We are living through a historic golden age for taking advantage of other people.
Oh.
Sorry.
So, uh, trans people are moving?
Right, yes! In the Seattle metro area, we are seeing a truly crazy number of trans-transplants showing up here lately. I should say, Seattle is sort of a terrible choice as far as big "progressive" cities go: It is brutally expensive and lacks the cultural diversity of other expensive cities like New York or even San Francisco. If I had to live in a monoculture, I probably wouldn't choose the one Jeff Bezos built.
Appreciate the unsolicited advice! Hope these hapless Kansans move somewhere better.
Ooh, I got bad news: They maybe can't leave, at least not yet. You see, their IDs might be invalid, which would give them trouble driving themselves, flying, or boarding any kind of long-distance train or bus route. Kansas is, unsurprisingly, rather tough on those found driving with an invalid license. Some states simply issue a small fine for getting pulled over with a license that happens to be invalid, and as long as you have the invalid license in your possession, you get partial credit. But Kansas mandates five days in jail (predictably, the wrong jail) at minimum, six months at maximum. As far as I know, hopping a freight train is still illegal too, so if you wanna maintain your freedom in The Freedom State, you're gonna be traveling by fourth-class rail or thumbing that shit.
Sorry, might be invalid?
According to an internal Kansas Department of Revenue (KDOR) directive obtained by the excellent independent journalist Marisa Kabas, "Currently, KDOR has not 'invalidated' any records for people who were sent letters due to the passing of SB244 which requires the 'sex at birth' to be listed on Kansas credentials."
But I thought you said the law instantly invalidated those licenses, with no grace period. They sent letters?
That's all true! The very same department put their letterhead on the letters that scared the shit out of everyone, and then sent an internal memo saying it actually hadn't happened yet. It could be that someone just borrowed their letterhead, but they don't wanna jump the gun on an inevitable lawsuit contesting the law. They've done this whole dance before, rather recently in fact. Nobody would blame a licensing department for not going out of its way to make outlaws of people when the legal basis might get overturned in a week.
Can trans folks re-validate their licenses?
Well yeah, but it ain't necessarily simple. Mississippi it isn't, but more Kansans live rurally than in many other states. Driving is kinda the way people get around out there, and now it's (maybe) punishable by incarceration. Only after reaching America's greatest temple to indignity, the DMV, may Kansans set about legally invalidating a major part of their existence. Luckily, the aforementioned memo says that the office is just supposed to do the revert with no questions asked, so I guess there's that.
Christ. How's the lawsuit looking?
They're hearing oral arguments for the ACLU's lawsuit the same day this article will be published! However, for me at least, the suit is actually one of the more disappointing things in this whole saga. The sort of fascinating thing about the law is that the actual function of it is to make the words "sex" and "gender" definitionally interchangeable. The lawsuit's argument is that those are two totally different things, and it concedes the existence and legitimacy of "biological sex at birth" where even the KDOR internal memo does not, but claims that it should only really matter to doctors, and that gender is much more relevant to how people should be treated under the law.
I hate to pull rank here, but as a trans woman, I disagree with basically all of this. I realize the plaintiffs in the suit are also trans, but frankly I doubt they drafted it. I'm not saying I think sex and gender are totally interchangeable concepts, but for the purposes of legal construction I think it actually makes more sense to acquiesce to the government's preference toward sex, and simply argue that sex is not immutable, and is actually quite easily altered. After all—
Dawg, I'm wearing a hat with buncha cheerleaders hittin' Pigeon Pose, you really think I'm ready to discuss transgender metaphysics?
You can take the hat off.
Continue.
After all, the category on the driver's license this is partially being fought over reads, and has always read, "sex." The law was perfectly happy to consider sex adjustable in the past. The way I've always conceptualized it for myself is that I was always female, and it was just my rotten luck that I was born into a society that had decided that it already knew better than I did what I am. I mean, "biological sex at birth" might make sense for some species, but as humans we have the ability to be however we want. And that's great! One construction of biology might state that many dick owners can't get an erection once they have aged some, but another construction of biology says that part of being human is that some of us dedicate their time to creating boner pills!
All right, already! You don't have to treat me like I'm listening to Rogan.
Apologies. I'm sure your dick works super normal. All I'm saying is, it's fucking bizarre to live in world of so many incredible advances in science and technology and medicine, but when it comes time to analyze the concepts of gender and sex, we try to behave like sex is somehow the one thing about ourselves that we have yet to discover how to alter to our own liking. It isn't! Humans were working on changing their "biological sex" well before "Kansas" even existed.
