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this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2026
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A Boring Dystopia
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"We apologize for the inconvenience this causes you."
Yes I'm sure you fucking do.
If they try this shit in my state, I’d fucking sue.
I had surgery BECAUSE it would let me change my drivers license. I paid $5500 as a broke college student because I was getting turned down for jobs with that stupid “F.”
I don’t understand how any of this is legal. The constitution prohibits “ex post facto” laws - how can you revoke someone’s documentation when they complied with the laws as they were at the time?
That's the thing - It's not. They don't give a shit, and the judicial system isn't doing anything about it
And even if they did, it would take months, if not years, to resolve. Until then people will either be disenfranchised and can't vote or forced to update their ID's, which could also take months of paperwork to resolve.
I agree with you generally that this should be illegal, but it probably isn't.
It definitely isn't ex post facto; this is not a law that punishes anyone from a legal perspective, it merely changes the requirements for a certain privilege (the ability to drive a vehicle). If it declared these licenses invalid before the date of the law (which could carry punishments for illegally operating vehicles), then it would be ex post facto.
Another way to put it is that it simply makes a certain action illegal which was previously legal, and laws do that sort of thing all the time. Consider that in the US you didn't need a driver's license in order to drive at all until 1913. The NJ law requiring drivers licenses also "revoked" someone's privilege even though they complied with the laws previously, requiring them to get a permit from then on. But, since it didn't introduce any punishments for not having the permit before it was introduced, it wasn't ex post facto.
Of course the law is also clearly discriminatory, but US's extremely limited anti-discrimination laws are likely not broad enough to be applied here.
The current events should awaken many people to the sad fact that US laws and its entire legal system exists primarily to protect the wealthy and the powerful from everyone else; all other functions are secondary. As such, many horrible, immoral, and unjust things are legal under US laws, and many others will be twisted into being legal by the supreme court.
It's true that this isn't ex post facto, but in a sane interpretation of the law it would be discrimination against a protected class; a woman who was assigned female at birth grts preferential treatment under the law with respect to a woman who was not.
The problem is that you respect and believe in words. The people currently in charge could give two fucks. Ultimately, words only have the power that we give them, so when those in charge ignore the Constitution, then the Contitution has no power.
I have severe ADHD. It's funny in a way because when I was younger, I tried to understand the rules of my employers and follow them. And yet I still lost jobs. In part because of issues related to ADHD specifically, but in part because what companies SAY the rules are is not what the rules are. If you've worked in a corporate environment, you know that there's go-to people for things. And while there's official processes (or maybe even not), what ACTUALLY happens is that someone goes to the person who can do something and asks them to do it, and generally they do, and that's like 75% of how business actually runs.
In the same way, there are rules and decorum and traditions in politics and revolve around the Constution and various bodies of legislature, et cetera. And so there's nothing that ACTUALLY forces anyone to follow any of that except voluntary compliance or physical threat because policing bodies enforce things.
This is why the rich are free, largely, from most crimes. They aren't enforced. And this is how our democracy crumbled. The Constitution hasn't been repealed. It doesn't have to be. It is simply ignored. Worse, those who claim to follow it shit on it and ignore it and throw it out.
And unfortunately those kinds of organisations are full of people who tend to lean very heavily towards authoritarianism, so once the winds shift enough you'll suddenly find that the people who are supposed to be enforcing the law, well, don't.
I'm currently outside the US but I'm pulling my hair out trying to renew my passport. I don't even care what's on it. The Nazi bastards don't give a fuck, the cruelty is the point
I've been trying to revive my childhood passport from my birth country since I fully expect passports to be next
This letter reads to me like it is someone from the Kansas executive branch (run by Democrat Governor Laura Kelly) legitimately apologizing that they are bound by Republican made, veto-overridden law to cause this inconvenience, but maybe I'm being too generous
That could be the case, I suppose. If they really wanted to be assholes about it, they could just not send anything at all. This at least explains how the recipient is effected and what they can/need to do
Not only that, but bare in mind that most government employees are there to do a job. They don't always agree with the laws they have to enforce and sometimes they will make it as challenging as possible for fascist ideas like this go through.
Complaining to them is like complaining to the checkout cashier at your grocery store that the prices are too high.
That's how I read this, too. The government isn't a monolith that just agrees with every law they have to follow. They do have to follow the law until it is challenged, though. Hopefully courts in KS knock this down.
Nah, this is bipartisan cruelty. The Democratic governor maintained a list of trans people who changed their markers. How do you think they were able to send out these letters so fast? They already had a list of anyone that had changed their gender marker. That list was created on the order of a Democratic governor.
No. It is GOP cruelty. Nothing "bipartisan" about it. From a different article:
Nothing ambiguous about it. I would also draw your attention to the first line of the above letter itself:
Generally speaking, governors do not personally compile healthcare-related lists. Any such list would be assembled by and come through the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, and with the Kansas state GOP supermajority passing the legislation making such lists mandatory, there would not be much the very obviously trans-friendly governor could do.
I genuinely do not see how you can lay GOP group evil at the feet on the one person clearly trying to do what she can to stop it.
It's almost like you don't want the GOP to get full credit for what the GOP supermajority is doing in Kansas to trans people.
It's almost like you're completely ignorant of this and are "umm aktually"ing an actual trans person who pays attention to this stuff!
No shit the law was passed by a Republican legislature. And yes, the law was vetoed by the governor. But maybe you're just one of those Blue MAGA types that assumes Dems can do no wrong. But a list of trans people in the state already existed. And that list wasn't created as a result of this law. It was created by policies of the Vital Records office, which the governor controls. In fact, Kansas, with its Democratic governor, had a pre-made list of trans people ready to go, which not even Texas and Florida had!
https://transitics.substack.com/p/kansas-secretly-spent-years-making
Whether by malice or ignorance matters little. Under the watch of a Democratic governor, the state went further than any other Republican state in having a records system that could instantly create a list of trans Kansas residents.
Yes, Republicans are the primary antagonists of trans folks. But Democrats are truthfully not much better. In fact, there are Democratic attorneys general in more than a dozen states that are currently ignoring their own state laws and refusing to enforce anti-discrimination laws. Many hospitals and clinics have been complying in advance with Trump's illegal executive orders targeting trans healthcare, stopping services for children and adults. Doing so is a direct violation of anti-discrimination laws that LGBT activists spent decades fighting to pass. But the laws mean nothing if the attorneys general aren't willing to actually enforce them.
A lot of Democrats have decided that sticking up for trans people is simply politically inconvenient. They won't actively try to pass persecutory laws, but they won't lift a finger to fight back against them either. The Kansas governor didn't want the optics of explicitly signing a piece of bigoted legislation, but she also didn't lift a finger to protect trans people. The very agencies she's in charge of designed their records system so that it would be easy to find trans people, and it never occurred to the Democratic governor to try and do something about this.
So yes, this is bipartisan cruelty. Don't be Blue MAGA and assume your side is innocent.
They might as well have said "THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER"