“Safety Concern” Used to Justify Kansas Drivers License Restrictions
Judge Teresa Watson is following the recent trend of conservative judges making up facts to prop-up anti-trans legislation.
by Evan Urquhart
Until recently, all 50 states had a procedure whereby trans people could update their drivers licenses as they transitioned to another gender. Laws that ban trans people from making these changes are, in fact, so new that resources for members of the transgender community seeking to update their douments have yet to be updated to reflect the changes to the law in Tennessee, Montana, and nw Kansas. Gender changes on legal identification such as driver’s licenses weren’t controversial in the past because many trans people aren’t recognizable as trans to a casual observer, meaning that a mismatch between their appearance and their documents can cause not only discomfort and forced outing for the trans person themselves but confusion and difficulty for others who attempt to use it as an identifier. Every state recognized that updating a gender marker on an ID is similar to updating the ID picture as one ages; as people change their identification is more accurate if it reflects those changes.
This common-sense status quo reality is not common enough to for Judge Teresa Watson on Kansas, who is concerned that police having access to an accurate, up-to-date ID might cause a safety issue for some reason. This tissue-thin justification for siding with anti-trans Attorney General Kris Kobach, who believes a law defining sex as having been assigned at birth ought to be interpreted to ban the DMV from updating gender on licenses was amplified by Fox News in their headline on the story.
screenshot from Fox News
The judge’s specific safety concern seems to have been that the predictable effect of a discriminatory law to ban people from updating their documents was a rush to update documents while it was still possible. This was the nebulous safety concern that the judge claimed could get in the way of licenses being “used by law enforcement to identify criminal suspects, crime victims, wanted persons, missing persons and others." Again, out of date gender markers can cause exactly the sort of confusion for law enforcement that the judge seems to be referencing.
As with much of the discomfort among transphobes with the reality of trans people’s existence their real problem is with reality. Trans people don’t all look the same. Some are identifiably trans, some aren’t, some still resemble their birth-assigned gender. Many trans people find they’re gendered differently over the course of a day, as strangers can key in on different features. Tall cis women with short hair are often mistaken for men, or for trans women. People’s appearances can’t be neatly sorted into two gender boxes: There’s overlap. There are edge cases.
This is too much for conservatives, who think that making laws to punish trans people will change reality and make it more predictable, more stable, less inconveniently nuanced and messy. But you can’t legislate away people’s diverse appearances, or the effects of surgery or hormone therapy. Conservatives can harass trans people with nuisance legislation, but they can’t change biology.