Kansas Is Punishing The Wrong One Percent
In their crusade against transgender people existing, Kansas's GOP-dominated legislature passed a law echoing one of the nastiest legal tactics of Nazi Germany.
A study published last year by The Advocate magazine estimated that 22,400 people in Kansas are transgender, approximately one percent of the state’s population. We talk a lot in politics about the “one percent,” referring to the billionaires who bleed the rest of us dry so they can live in absurd levels of luxury. That one percent exists because of a bankrupt economic and political system that protects the most predatory of capitalistic methods. You may even hear about “legislating billionaires out of existence.” That turn of phrase, however, refers to taxing billionaires so that they are no longer billionaires, merely multimillionaires. It’s a small amount of sacrifice that won’t materially harm their lives if we can ever make it a reality in this nation.
What’s happening tonight in Kansas, though, is not a legal reduction of wealth to levels more manageable. It is a full-blown assault on the very being of the 22,400 transgender Kansas citizens.
Erin Reed, a transgender journalist who runs an excellent newsletter, Erin in the Morning, reported earlier that as part of a legislative ambush that became a massive, sweeping anti-trans bill, Kansas had declared every driver’s license issued to a transgender person null and void, effective today, February 26th. It doesn’t stop there, of course, as it also created a “bathroom bounty,” nearly identical to Texas’ notorious “abortion bounty” law of 2022, which allows people to sue if they unwillingly share a public bathroom with a transgender person. Furthermore, it even appears to ban people of the opposite sex visiting in dorm rooms or nursing homes. Democratic Governor Laura Kelly had vetoed the bill, and the legislature nearly suffered whiplash en masse as they stampeded right back into session to override the veto.
It is not only the stripping of a basic human need in a rural state (the ability to drive), but this law essentially makes transgender people in Kansas an “unperson.” Without a valid driver’s license, they cannot vote, board an airplane, obtain credit, open a bank account, so on and so forth. It is designed to do the same as the Nazi stripping of standard passports from Jews did 88 years ago (and we all know how much the white supremacist GOPers love that number)—restrict their rights, their movements, and strip their basic humanity from them.
None of this makes anyone safer. It doesn’t “protect children” or “protect women’s sports.” It’s just one more act of unnecessary cruelty, imposed upon a small, vulnerable minority by a majority power that enjoys inflicting suffering upon others. Everything, and I do mean everything, that Republican Party-led governments do these days is in the service of:
Assisting the accumulation of wealth by the Epstein class
Stripping rights from minorities
Shredding the safety net that helps the neediest amongst us
Creating a white Christian nationalist infrastructure in contravention of the Constitution
Hurting vulnerable people
They’re the walking embodiment of the Michael Jordan meme below.
And if you happen to be on the fence with the rights of transgender people, I hope you remember that these actions start with small, vulnerable minorities and then expand further out. Once you take the civil rights of one group of citizens, everyone’s are at stake. The SAVE Act that is making its way through Congress is, just like this Kansas law, so broadly written that it would strip voting rights from married women because their names would not match their birth certificates. That’s an estimated 70 million Americans. It’ll only keep going from there.
We must, must, make it clear to those in power this is unacceptable. There is no longer the option of “not being political” or “not paying attention to the news.” Staying in the dark simply makes it that much easier to rob you blind of everything you cherish.