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So forcing the German Jews to adopt the name Israel or Sara on legal documents was not a violation of their rights? If some racist jerk wants to call everyone he considers Black 'Nigger $lastname' instead of 'Mr. $lastname', or if a state mandates this, that is all just fine?
You can not compel people to really treat you as your identified gender any more than you can compel them to treat you as one of the cool kids. If a bearded person in a dress complains that none of the guys at the bars are buying them drinks, that is not really actionable.
I think there is no reason to even track the gender or sex on driving licences or in DMV databases. Outside Kansas, people are generally not driving with their dicks.
I think the US is generally rather accommodating with name changes. If you do not like the name your parents gave you, you can change it. The government is generally not going to say 'you were assigned Kevin at birth, you will never be a Benjamin'. But here the government of Kansas is saying 'all of you who have changed their name to Benjamin, all your identity documents are invalid effective immediately. Get new documents which say Kevin.'
This is basically 'your passports are invalid until you get the J stamp', the state unreasonably punishing an outgroup for partisan reasons.
Making driving a car an inalienable right would have large negative externalities. Of course, the libertarian approach would be that what qualifications you need is between you and your liability insurer.
By contrast, for all the moral panic about trans people from the Republicans, the state not caring about your gender identity matching your sex assigned at birth will not have such negative externalities. Nobody is forcing anyone to suck trans cocks. As a straight guy, I can spend weeks without thinking about the existence of dickgirls at all, something which MAGA seems completely unable to achieve.
I am also doubtful that for all the CW-ness of transness, it will be a vote winner for either side. Most people are not trans, nor do they frequently suffer from their tinder dates having unexpected genitals or losing to bearded people in athletic competitions. When the SJ left campaigned on trans, they mostly lost badly, but not because Americans hated trans people, but because they were apathetic -- "here I am stuck trying to make ends meet, and you want me to care about the plight of some sexual deviant". I have high hopes that the reaction in 2026 will be similar: "grocery prices are through the roof, and the MAGA elites want to tell me that forcing some Kansas trannies to get new driving licences is a win for the little man somehow".
It was. The state was compelling others to refer to them with a specific designation and suppressing all other ones.
A state shouldn't compel anyone's speech, so no to the latter. To the former, it's not practical to stop someone from saying nigger and a state should not even try. I advise people against saying nigger in polite company due to the obvious social consequences, but people do have the right to say it.
It wouldn't be as inalienable as you think. It would just be like guns, which supposedly are a right but in practice function more like a privilege than driving is. I can imagine a world where you don't need a license but you still need to be old enough, follow safety laws, etc. and can be prohibited from operating a vehicle if necessary, just like how states have regulations on riding a bicycle but don't mandate licensing, registration, or insurance.
Should MAGA avoid reading sources like AP News, which routinely promotes the plights of trans people, so they don't have to think about them? I'm confused by this tendency to argue that trans people don't matter to your life and why are you even thinking about them in the first place, you're just obsessed -- and then in the next breath crow on about how trans people are oppressed and their suffering is so important that they are to be prioritized above the price of eggs. You can't have it both ways. If it's worth your time to make trans people the centerpiece of discussion, then it's worth my time to give my opinion on them.
A lot of people have children and are concerned (rightly or wrongly) about trans people grooming their kids. MAGA has issues but I don't think being anti-trans is one of them.
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This is false. For example, the state of California has since 2014 compelled all state schools, by law, to treat transgender individuals as their identified gender by permitting them entrance and participation in sex segregated spaces.
Kansas, like all states, records "sex" not "gender" on the driver's licenses it issues.
It is entirely reasonable for Kansas to require true information that is useful for identifying those it issues licenses to because that is the entire purpose of driver's licenses, to provide true and useful identifying information on those to who it is issued.
Would it be reasonable for a state to issue a license with a different picture than the holder? With a different name? With a different date of birth? Or would doing these things defeat the purpose of the driver's license?
The negative externality here is not about identification or paperwork. It is that the state has embraced and celebrated and mandated untruth. That our shared truth seeking institutions are no longer seeking a truth that reflects material reality because they have been cowed with histrionic comparisons to the genocides of Nazi Germany.
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