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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

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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.

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.

This is basically 'your passports are invalid until you get the J stamp', the state unreasonably punishing an outgroup for partisan reasons.

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?

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.

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.