In addition to the driver’s license provisions, the law bans transgender people from using bathrooms matching their gender identity in public buildings and creates a bathroom bounty hunter system allowing citizens to sue transgender people they encounter in restrooms for at least $1,000 in damages, including potentially in private restrooms. The bill takes effect immediately upon publication in the Kansas Register rather than the standard July 1 effective date—giving transgender Kansans just days between the override and the invalidation of their identity documents.
The consequences for noncompliance could escalate quickly. Under Kansas law, driving without a valid license is a class B misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine—though first-time offenders are more likely to face a citation and fine. A conviction, however, triggers an automatic 90-day license suspension. If a person drives during that suspension, they face a charge of driving on a suspended license, which carries a mandatory minimum of five days in jail. Kansas already requires county jails to house inmates by sex assigned at birth.
I bet all households in Kansas have gender neutral bathrooms. Obviously not public, but still.
Add some commercial bathrooms to the mix too. They gunna outlaw those?
I can see a future in which some minority couple in Wichita has their door blasted in by ICE, their dog shot, their children kidnapped, and their teeth kicked in. When asked why the family was targeted, Kristi Noem and Kash Patel will go on TV to insist they were in clear violation of Transgender Bathroom Laws.
Kansas has a dem governor tho
Oh shit she DID veto it and those fucks overrode her veto??
Gerrymandering is a hell of a drug.
I’m not trans, nor American, but my opinion is TRANS RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS.
Should we report magas for being in the wrong bathroom? Gum up their little bounty system?
Helpful to understand how these systems of power work. More often than not, the people making these reports will be members of the local republican party, a local church, or a similar conservatively aligned trust organization. They’ll organize these stings in partisan club meetings and partner with law firms and file in courts with friendly professionals.
You can certainly clog up the primary intake line. But shy of knowing the right Signal chat to join or just surrounding Ken Paxton’s DAs with mega-phones blasting “I saw your mom in the men’s restroom”, you’re not going to interrupt the back channels.
The bounty system goes through the civil courts, so there’s no efficient way to gum it up with reports. Anything frivolous would get thrown out immediately.
Absolutely
Better to save the time, money, and energy for getting folks out of Kansas and providing support for the ones still stuck there.
The bounty system goes through the civil courts and they can throw out frivolous suits as they please, so trying to gum it up with frivolous suits would be a lot more expensive than the benefits such a tactic would confer.
Every day the US gets closer to becoming like Afghanistan, a place that they mock for having no freedom or tolerance, but have plenty of religious persecution.
Every day the US gets closer to becoming like Afghanistan
You mean the country we conquered and ruled with an iron fist for 23 years?
Brother, we’re already there. All we can hope for is a kind of grassroots insurrection to get occupying paramilitary out of our neighborhoods
Good luck!
The Republicans looked at Saudi Arabia and said, “Yes please.”
That’s a lot of cost and effort to hurt vulnerable minorities for no benefit. Kansas must breed a very special kind of stupid. It’s not just a flyover state, its now a fuckover state too.
for no benefit
The benefits are primarily political. Wealthy reactionary donors reward elected officials with more money. Church groups reward state legislators with votes. Fascist vigilantes reward the government with cheap snitching.
Kansas must breed a very special kind of stupid.
There’s a whole book on it.
What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America
At the same time, these laws have created their own kind of blowback. As the conservatives pivot to appease an extremist minority, they’ve shed their populist mandate and needed to lean harder and harder on gerrymandering, misinformation, and terror campaigns to keep control.
Kansas is fucking weird because they do shit like this but also voted to make abortion a constitutional right in the state.
Most states are like that. I don’t think there’s any true red states if you eliminated the vote manipulation
Texas would be blue without their rampant voter suppression.
The governor vetoed the bill and then the legislature overrode it.
This is entirely due to gerrymandering of state legislative seats. A savvy liberal party would organize a constitutional amendment to protect civil rights and put that on the ballot in November.
They’d get the Ohio treatment then. Partisan gerrymandering is constitutionally illegal in ohio, and when the state supreme court struck down a partisan map the state congress kept presenting the same one until it was too late. No punishment.
This post is going to get deleted, because MBFC rated Erin in the Morning as “mixed factuality” years ago while misrepresenting the “failed” fact checks by removing context. The dumbfuck (almost certainly cis) person who rated her article about TN introducing a bill to force drag performers to get a permit with the state as untrue can fucking fight me IRL. A bill that doesn’t define what drag or a performance is is a risk to trans people, and anyone who thinks otherwise is an ignorant jackass. Doesn’t matter that mainstream media outlets cite her trans legislation risk map, she’s UnReLiAbLe.
But MBFC lets them turn their brains off when evaluating sources, so one of the most prominent independent trans reporters isn’t allowed here because the mods are intellectually lazy.
I never had much respect for MBFC. I remember someone sending me a link to Wonkette’s rating on there and writing them off as being “extreme left” because of this dopey site.
When you look closer at MBFC, it’s exactly the kind of thing you’d see Chomsky talking about for years. The “acceptable spectrum” in American media is exceptionally narrow and MBFC perfect reflects this absurd bias.
I’m sure if someone not used to/indoctrinated by that narrow view were to look at a rating like that, they’d expect Wonkette to be some kind of Marxist-Leninist enclave of people all trying to out-tankie each other and rattling off quotes from Mao’s little red book. It is nothing of the sort, and I’m sure not a few leftists call them “neoliberal shills” and “shitlibs” and so on, LOL.
In fairness, I guess it’s possible it’s not because of MBFC but because of one of the ‘alternative’ sites that sell you a quick, easy, zero thought source evaluation (who just happen to lift MBFC’s ratings virtually identically).
But you’re absolutely correct, it’s centering a mainstream American cultural point of view, which itself is political and biased. The idea of “unbiased” is a joke in anthropological circles for a reason; everyone has bias. Erin’s bias is towards not wanting to fucking die while the New York Times’ bias is towards using neoliberal ideology flirting with fascism to make the maximum amount of money possible, but only one of them is verboten here.
Really fucking weird to not have anything better to do than worry about where people go to the bathroom.
It bothers the hell out of me … Republicans always project, so are they doing something to people in bathrooms that we should worry about.See, that’s BS, it just bounced back on me.
This society must burn.
Donald Sutherland: May I have a match, please….
Toilets-shmoilets… Ok, there is at least some controversy here. But why driver licenses?!
On top of what other people has said, it prevents trans people from moving freely in this personal vehicle dependent society. It make fleeing harder. It makes proving your identity harder. They are setting trans people up to be taken and deported.
Because they don’t believe we have any right to exist in society. The cruelty is the point. The goal is to hurt people.
Conform or die.
To punish them.
It’s the closest thing the US has to a national ID card, there’s a blanket assumption that every functioning adult has one (or the non-driving-license equivalent, administered by the same authorities).
