Trans people in Florida can no longer update their driver’s licenses: A new state rule may expose trans people to criminal or civil penalties if they try to update their documentation.
You have a good point, but I'd like to add that the group mentality is probably different from what a single bully would do or feel.
I think that this comes from these people being scared of not fitting in and from not having anything in common with the other people who don't fit it, so instead of uniting for a common goal, they can only find unity in being against something that they have in common not being.
That's why they attack minorities of all kinds.
It also explains the hypocrisy. The individual isn't afraid of abortions, homosexuals or mexicans. Sometimes they need to accept those on an individual level, but they still go along with the anti-politics because it's not about themselves personally.
Facism isn't just based on simple hatred. It's mostly based on fear of not fitting in, because the individual is well aware of their own not fitting in.
Fascism is also an ideology of fear. It requires an enemy that's both weak and existentially threatening in order to frighten and divide people.
For the modern right that enemy is now the trans community. And make no mistake, it's cynical and deliberate. Alt right figures sought and found the enemy they needed to galvanize voters, and now they're stoking that fear as best they can.
When it was making rules against gender-affirming care for children, at least they could hide behind the (ludicrously false) "we're protecting the children!" argument.
They can't even do that here. There is just no justification for this beyond either "god doesn't want this to happen" or just basic cruelty.
This is how it was explained to me; I'll do the best I can to write it out in a way that makes sense.
You know how most left-leaning see MAGA as a cult of idiocy? Really Really dumb people easily motivated by propaganda, that if it weren't for trump and other republican bad actors, they would just otherwise be innocent idiots ready to be manipulated by someone else? There exists a subset of conservatives that believe idiocy and gullibility applies to both sides. Just like a simple farmer can get turned storm-the-capitol-terrorist by a few tweets and youtube videos, the theory is that an innocent dumb gay kid can be turned trans by a few tiktoks. They don't look at it like a rights issue; they don't believe that most trans people actually exist. They look at it like catering to a dangerous cult who manipulates their followers into self-mutilation and a terribly unhappy life.
The thing about making an argument in good faith, is that logic and reason generally always apply to produce the same conclusions if given the same set of facts. There are plenty of people out there perfectly content to make a bad faith argument for personal gain, and I'm not really talking about those people. The issue with trans rights is that it's very easy to make a good faith argument with only a minor dispute in facts that leads down a path of "treat the disease" rather than "give them rights" when solving in good faith for "protect the vulnerable".
Think about it this way, You probably wouldn't argue that law should cater towards the reality MAGA repubes believe the world to exist in, right?
They retool and reuse a lot of anti LGB arguments - they still hate gay people, they just know it doesn’t play well right now.
The “protect the children” crowd put out so many lies that it’s impossible to keep up with. Chuds pretend that kids can just walk into a clinic, say “I think I’m a boy/girl” and walk out with a hormone script and a surgery appointment, and because most people don’t know anything about transgender care they believe it. I don’t think your average person actually is that bothered by real trans people, they’re just lead to believe that 8 year olds are getting their penises lopped off.
Because we’re the enemy. We’re different and bad and we make them uncomfortable so we must be why they’re unhappy and why their lives aren’t what they thought they should be
It makes more sense if you look at this as them needing a scapegoat.
Most people don't (or until very recently didn't) really understand what being transgender actually is all about.
This makes it really easy to fearmonger the general population, by painting their "lifestyle" as everything that is wrong with society.
And if you want to solve this issue.. well clearly you have to vote for them, because the other guys don't see the inherent dangers of transgenderism, now do they?
This is not anything inherent to being transgender. The scapegoat before this were homosexuals.
However society has progressed to the point where most people understand what homosexuality is, and accept (or at the very least tolerate) homosexuals existing as a part of society. It turns out they weren't pedophilic devil worshipers after all..
That will happen with transgender people too. People will learn, acceptance will grow.
And when it does, these cretins move on to the next minority group.
Bonus round: Replace "transgender" with "Jew" in the things I mentioned above, and see what that reminds you of.
I know this is going to sound petty but small point of order - transgender is an adjective. It goes before who is being described - example "Transgender people"
"Transgenders"is a word that we in the community sometimes see from sources that want to create us as a wholesale noun. Usually same linguistic place as removing " cis" as an equal adjective in language and an adjective (ie "there are normal people and then there are transgenders") or to create a differentiating noun wholesale by removing the space between adjective and noun ( ie. "that's not a woman it's a transwoman")
These may seem a ridiculously small thing but in some places these linguistic cues are used either as subtle anti-trans dog whistles on the right... And on the other side of it inside the community the kindest way we tend to use the term is jokingly when doing impersonations of grandparents and the like... ie "Those kids today and their pokemans and their transgenders! When I was a kid we had bottlecaps and we liked it!"
The real question here is why driver's licenses have a gender field; we can't sanely discuss questions about it (including why "they" care about this field so much) without answering this first.
It's a wedge issue. They incite hatred against their preferred minority (trans people in this case) and then score points with their voters by passing laws to harm that minority.
These are people who make up their own fantasies about oppression where they walk away the hero and someone starts a slow clap. All of this is based really on insecurity and projecting that outwards rather than to try to become a better person inside. They project their fears on others and make others suffer, as that is the only thing that can satisfy someone who believes they are pushed into a corner.
This doesn't even make sense from an administrative standpoint. The purpose of government identification is identification. If I can't update my driver's license to make me easier to identify then the entire purpose of having a gender on the ID card is moot
This is a weak justification, but here is a strawman:
If a person is involved in a firey buscrash, it is helpful to the coroner to know what biological sex someone was born as to help with identification (different bone structures etc).
To tear that strawman down again, there is absolutely no reason that the drivers licence couldnt show their gender, and the authority could also track their sex in their system.
Of course, this is Florida, the answer is obvious, they are doing it to fuck over trans people....
I understand that not being able to change forms of ID can cause problems for trans people, but if I were trans, I would be terrified to out myself to the state of Florida. I feel for my brothers and sisters affected by this bullshit.
That justification gets even weaker when there's no fire in the lethal crash. They're not looking at burned skeletons, they're just looking at corpses.
Also! Skeletal differences are actually minimal in people who transitioned at a young enough age, so that wouldn't even be helpful in their case.
If a person is involved in a firey buscrash, it is helpful to the coroner to know what biological sex someone was born as to help with identification (different bone structures etc).
Yeah... no. The bone structures aren't that different. It's more likely that anthropologist can't identify the sex by bones alone than they can. I also can't think of a different reason for it, but there really doesn't need to be a reason for them to just be bigots.
Well, what is the function of having sex/gender on an ID? It's to make someone more identifiable, right?
That means that "verification" only needs to be visual. The purpose is to be able to tell, at a glance, that the ID and the person are a match. That's why eye color and height are on there too. Precise record keeping is for the court house and hospital records, not a driver's license.
By using sex and making that unchangeable it actually makes my ID less useful for identifying me.
That's an advantage that trans people who can 'pass' have, but not every person looks physically enough like their expressed gender and suddenly they're "a man in a dress" or something.
I mean this is true but there should be a known grace period where you can show the cop some sort of medical procedure will be affecting the data on your passport in the coming year. I've followed some such transitions and can be a period of several years actually. So maybe the state and federal governments should have a sex change license or application like they do for marriage. That way everything is legal.
I've had to carry around proof of my transness for years before I got to change my documents. It's not really fun having to expose your medical history to that random dude over there because you're trying to buy alcohol with an ID that says "female" and you have a full beard. It's humiliating and could even be dangerous if you happen to hand your ID to a raging bigot that'll now know you're trans
I don't think the IDs need sex on them. A name, a picture, a number, birthday, height and what sort of vehicles you are licensed to operate.
If it's that divisive, remove the field. I do not have a women's driving permit, I can drive the same things my husband can, it's not used for anything related to its function. A picture gives more information on identity, then if someone transitioned they could go get a new one and it would identify them correctly.
Next up: Florida creates Women's Driving Permit, only pink vehicles and engines below 120cc. Men on the other hand need a vehicle greater than 150cc with a hood high enough to no longer need to see children, as that is women's business.
The article specifically mentions changing the gender and nothing about name. Lots of people get name changes for various reasons, but it’s a whole process.
So how is this law enforceable? Isn't the gender marker change through the state itself? I obviously assume they're going to stop providing the changes, but what about people who have already had it changed? Or is this meant to punish trans people from other states traveling to Florida?
Inevitably a cisgender woman who does not meet enforced standards of femininity will get arrested for this. Or trans men who have not changed their gender marker. Violence against queer people and cis women is the intention.
I think the most pertinent question these days is why is sex listed on a drivers licence anyway? If it's referring to phenotype why does anyone I give my ID to need to know what genitals are in my smallclothes? If it's referring to chromasomal makeup why the hell is that relevant to the guy at the liquor store?
If it refers to gender then the consideration becomes that you can't always intuit gender from presentation so that's hardly good at creating any benefit for visual identification.
ID is an issue in general for non-binary people. Here in Canada your passport and licence have to match but getting an X gender marker on your passport means your documents have a solid opportunity to subject you to travel discrimination and whether or not that ID will even be accepted abroad becomes a serious and sometimes peicemeal question.
The question of "should we allow changes of sex on identifying documents" is kind of missing the point. We should be talking total abolition of registration of sex on drivers licences.