What’s happening in Kansas right now...

Transcript Transcribed by Laura M.

Courtney: Hello everyone and welcome back. My name is Courtney. I’m here with my spouse Royce. Together we are The Ace Couple and we are coming to you from the highly disappointing state of Kansas. I am livid, distraught, beside myself, and we’re gonna talk about it today. So by now, over the last— week or two, I’m sure that several of you have heard about at least some of the bullshit that’s going on over here right now. It’s been making, certainly, national headlines at least. I’m not sure if it’s broken out internationally yet, but Kansas has decided to make a horrifying escalation in the epidemic of Trans Bathroom Bills that we’ve been fighting for years now. And I do think it is important to talk about here because I don’t think this is going to be the last instance like this.

Courtney: Our government here in the US, it is no surprise, is getting real fascist. And the Republicans are terrified of the upcoming midterm elections, and they are doing absolutely everything they can to rig it in their favor, which of course includes taking away the rights of American citizens. And Kansas has played into that in a new and terrifying way. So if you’ve been keeping up with the news, you will see things about Kansas invalidating the licenses of transgender Kansans. This is, as far as I’m aware, a first-of-its-kind bill in the United States. But it doesn’t just do that. This was weaseled into a Bathroom Bill. So this bill started as, you know, your sex assigned at birth is what bathroom you need to use. But lawmakers also, in an attempt to get this passed very quickly, basically, you know, cut that bill open, inserted new language from a totally unrelated bill, cut and pasted it right into the middle, and jammed it through.

Courtney: Our governor, Laura Kelly, is a Democrat. She is as much a queer ally as anyone else in our state legislature. She actually vetoed this bill. And mind you, we’ve talked a little bit about our local politics before. We talked about housing discrimination when not even our state but our local county was making national headlines. We’ve talked personally on this about how Governor Kelly has made proclamations, with our help, acknowledging Ace Week in the state of Kansas, acknowledging Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week in the state of Kansas. Both of those things, Laura Kelly has done for us. When this bill came onto her table, she vetoed it, but our state is gerrymandered to hell, so there’s a Republican supermajority.

Royce: For people outside of the states, that is a common theme. A lot of things about elections have been rigged one way or another for a long time and continue to do so. Gerrymandering is a big part of it. Voter laws differ state to state, and some allow for more flippant refusal of votes than others. But there are a variety of ways that the people who are in elected office don’t actually represent the people living within their jurisdiction.

Courtney: For sure. So there were enough of these Republicans to override her veto. And I just gotta say, I’m so disappointed in the state of Kansas right now. There have been instances where I have been very proud to be in Kansas politically. A lot of people assume all of the states right in the middle of the country are all just, you know, flyover country, they’re all deep red. And of course there are red pockets here, but like, living in the Kansas City metro, like, there have been so many times where I’m like, “Oh, thank God we live on the Kansas side of this state line and not the Missouri one.” [laughs] There have been times, when Roe vs Wade got overturned, for instance, Kansas was the first state to propose a new statewide ban on abortions after that Supreme Court ruling.

Courtney: So of course, all eyes were on Kansas for the political implication of that. And we turned that shit down. We turned that shit down hard. We have up until now resisted formal bathroom bans. And that does not necessarily mean that every place within the state of Kansas has been, you know, safe and cozy for trans folks to use the bathroom they identify with. Of course not. I have friends who have explained to me, you know, in this county or this city, in this area, I can tend to use the bathrooms no problem. But if I’m traveling and I’m in the more rural area of Kansas, there have been instances where I know trans women who have been harassed, who have had people who have either called or threatened to call the police because they see her using the women’s bathroom.

Courtney: So I don’t want to paint a picture of we were a trans haven before. Of course not. Just a year ago, we were talking about how Kansas banned trans healthcare for minors. We had a whole episode about that. So clearly this has been, like, stepping stones have been put in place to not only deny the rights of trans Kansans, but also to deny the rights of minors, children, teenagers in the state of Kansas. And that— you know, maybe instead of putting a pin on it, because I will rant and I will forget, maybe let’s go into the denying the rights of minors real fast. Because there’s so much political unrest right now, ’cause— Mind you, we are also battling ICE in the state right now.

Courtney: I know national headlines have mostly focused on Minnesota because of everything that’s happened in Minnesota, but ICE is very much in Kansas. It’s in Kansas City, it is on both sides of the state line. But lots of folks are trying to do something about it before it escalates to the point that we have seen in Minnesota. So there are a lot of people here organizing. There is rapid response. I personally have tried to go out and be a legal observer when I hear, “Hey, ICE is doing a raid, like, a 10-minute drive from your house.” We’ve been 3D printing ICE whistles, which is a very interesting thing that you can just do if you have a 3D printer out there. You can just print whistles and give them to all of your friends and neighbors. Isn’t that a neat thing about modern technology?

Royce: The tiny little plastic ones aren’t super loud, but they work well enough.

Courtney: And naturally, there have been protests, including student protests. There are teenagers who have been organizing their own walkouts during school hours, as is their right to do. And every single one of those students is strong and brave and badass and we love them for it. But of course, all these old white Republican men— and mind you, when we go back to talking about the bigoted trans laws, it is men who are introducing these bills, who are talking and commenting on these bills. Of course there are some Republican women who are in our government at a state level who have supported these things, but it is men who are pushing them through.

Courtney: If you go to look at all of these bills, it’s– it’s dudes. It’s dudes trying to legislate women’s spaces. And for some reason, the women who are Republicans don’t see the irony in that. But going back to these student protests that are happening. And the ones I’m most acutely aware of are the anti-ICE protests organized by students, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there are also student protests about these trans laws. But the Republicans don’t really care what the protest is about. They want to basically ban students from protesting. And they’re trying to pass legislation right now that says if students participate in a protest during school hours, they need parental permission. They need a permission slip from their guardians as if it were a field trip to participate in the protest.

Royce: I saw a headline about this. Does this define students as in up to high school? Like, not collegiate students?

Courtney: Yeah, this is K-12. As far as I’m aware. Because it’s targeting minors who need parental permission, for one. But also because they probably just have more ability to, like, penalize K-12 schools. And that’s, for those outside of the United States, that’s kindergarten through 12th grade. Which is like, you enter kindergarten 5 or 6 years old, and then it’s first grade up until basically you’re 18. Uh, 17 or 18 is our final year of mandatory school here in the US. And you might be thinking, as I was, as we all were, how are they going to enforce, “Oh, this student doesn’t have permission from their parents to walk out and protest, how are we going to do that?” Well, by punishing the school, of course.

Courtney: Because Republicans are like: wow, we can punish minors and the education system that we’re also trying to topple. Two for one. What if we fine the school potentially over $100,000 per day that they enabled students to walk out who did not have parental permission? This is absurd. Because of course with that amount of money, that’s– that’s more than the teachers make a year. Every individual teacher. Maybe the principals are making that much or more. For sure, like, the superintendent of an entire school district is probably making that. But the average teacher? Okay, I’m gonna look it up because I haven’t looked this up in a few years. So the average annual salary for a schoolteacher in Kansas is about a little under $55,000 a year, but can be as low as $32,000 a year.

Courtney: So this is 2 or 3 times the annual salary of a schoolteacher per day! That the students decide to exercise their First Amendment rights to speech and protest. Because they don’t want minors to have rights. Minors don’t have rights. They can’t access healthcare. They can’t exercise their right of free speech, the very First Amendment. If they get jobs, they don’t get to vote in elections, and yet they still get taxed on their paychecks while they sit in school every day to learn about how our country was founded because people were angry about no taxation without representation! So of course the kids are gonna get angry when they can’t do anything in our political system about the horrors that they’re seeing.

Courtney: They want to go Boston Tea Party on this shit. [laughs] And they’re like, “Um, no, what if we financially ruin your school, your entire school district, if you do that?” And to me, honestly, the way the Republicans have been when we talked about Project 2025, when we’ve talked about all of their intentions of gutting the education system top down, when we talked recently about how kids need more sexual relationships and less college, there is a war on education in this country. This seems to me, for the Republicans, to be a win-win. They’re like, either we’ll shut up these kids who we want to shut up, or we’ll get to penalize the schools that we don’t want to exist anyway. We think everyone should be homeschooled by deeply religious right-wing organizations. So they’re like, “Either way, we have to win!”

Royce: That and for-profit private schools, which are also usually run by wealthy religious organizations.

Courtney: And if they’re already trying to do this, what other lengths will they go to? I… I honestly don’t know the full extent of what student protests look like at this point. I’ve seen the very visible ones where students are physically walking out of school. But I know when I was in school— [chuckles] It’s– it’s so interesting to see the bell curve of rights. Because it’s like, oh, before we had so many queer rights that we now do. Although I’m saying it in the era where they’re being rapidly stripped away, so— before gay marriage, for instance. That was a yearly protest at my school, at least for the 4 years of high school I was aware of it. It wasn’t a walkout, it wasn’t a big visible demonstration, but it was a day of silence.

Courtney: And it wasn’t like every single person in class, it wasn’t even like half or a majority of people in class were doing it, but a certain number of students every year, myself included, would observe a day of silence where we would go into school and we would not talk the entire day. Including to teachers, including for giving presentations, things like that. And most teachers were very willing to accommodate that. They’d say, “Okay, if you’re observing this today, then, you know, if you have to give a speech, do it tomorrow.” They even for a couple years, I think, gave us stickers to, like, identify so we could report to the school if we were following that. Because I don’t know if this was just a concern people had or if anyone was actually doing it, but there was definitely a like, “Oh, what if someone says they’re observing this thing to get out of doing something, but they really aren’t?”

Courtney: So it got to a point where we’d come and report and say, “Yes, I’m observing the Day of Silence today.” We’d get like a sticker for it so that there would be a visual indicator about it. And for the most part, our school was willing to work with us to make sure that we had the right to protest in that way during the school day. And that was for queer rights. Those are for queer rights that we didn’t have when I was a kid, we got in my adulthood, and now, in my slightly later adulthood, they’re being challenged again. People are trying to roll them back. And this is where we’re at here today, where not only has this bathroom bill been imposed, but the license being invalidated is objectively terrifying.

Courtney: The Kansas Department of Motor Vehicles, or DMV, was required to immediately invalidate an estimated 1,700 driver’s licenses overnight because of this law. And they did have a system where they could essentially put flags on any ID in their system internally that has had their gender marker changed, which has been perfectly legal to do at varying times in Kansas. In fact, trans people had the option to change for— from male to female, female to male. I believe Kansas did have the option for an X gender marker, because I think when they first passed that, I remember asking you if that was anything you’d ever be interested in, and you were not. Which now I’m grateful for. [laughs] And there were— like, the last 2 years, they’ve put a pause on it, and trans Kansans were not able to do this.

Courtney: But they reinstated it just, like, a few months ago, just like back in October, just a couple months before the end of 2025. They reinstated the ability to change gender markers on licenses. So there were some Kansans who had been waiting for this to be allowable again and just changed their licenses a few months ago because of this. But now, overnight, with no grace period, first of all. Usually when Kansas laws get passed during this legislative session, normally they’re all slated to go into effect like July 1st. So we all know months in advance, like, oh, this is going to happen in a few months. No, they changed the law of this bill to say effective immediately. To invalidate not only state IDs and driver’s licenses issued by the state of Kansas, but also any birth certificates that had the gender marker changed. Which was also fully legally allowable for a period of time.

Courtney: So that’s important to know, even if anyone out there was born in Kansas but no longer lives here. If you have a Kansas-issued birth certificate because you were born in this state and you at any point had your gender marker changed, you don’t have a valid birth certificate anymore. And isn’t that terrifying in this country right now with all of this ICE bullshit we’ve been seeing? So even though we’ve seen Bathroom Bills for years, this one is a new beast. It is a terrifying escalation. Because not only does it say it is now illegal for trans people to use a bathroom if it does not match their sex assigned at birth, they also allow anybody, any person in the state to sue anybody else that they believe violated the law for $1,000. So they are calling it the Bathroom Bounty Bill now.

Courtney: Because now think about all of those weirdo transvestigators online who always go, “Oh, we can always tell.” Think of all the butch women you’ve ever heard about who are completely cisgender who get harassed using the women’s bathroom just because they don’t look feminine enough. All of this harassment is going to escalate, and quite frankly, our court system is not set up to handle a wave of people suing one another for $1,000. Absolutely ridiculous. So while trans Kansans are grappling with the implication of this Bathroom Bill, they’re also just having their licenses and birth certificates revoked from right underneath them. A lot of them received letters. Not all. In fact, as of the day that this went into effect, it was estimated that they had only sent out 300 letters when they needed to send out nearly 2,000.

Courtney: And even in things that aren’t rush jobs like this, like routine DMV letters, they usually send the letter to the address on your license, but you only get your license renewed, like, every 7 years usually. So very often people will move addresses within a 7-year time frame and might not necessarily fix it on their license immediately because going to the DMV takes time, it costs money, it’s a headache. It is a pain in the ass. I personally— and this was years ago, this is when I still lived in South Dakota— I had the DMV send me a letter that I just did not receive because it went to the wrong place. And they even had it on file that, “Oh, this letter got returned to sender. So yeah, we know it didn’t get to you.” But the further implications of invalidating these licenses. In the state of Kansas, you’re basically forced to drive. There are very few people who live as independent adults in the state of Kansas who can survive without a driver’s license and a car. Because it is hard to live in a place— maybe— are there areas of Wichita that are, like, walkable enough that you could live without a car?

Royce: I highly doubt it.

Courtney: Like, our public transport in Kansas is pitiful. It is bad. It is inconsistent. It is slow. It’s not even like 24/7 a lot of the time. [laughs] Where we live, I can’t walk to the grocery store and back home. I can’t. I either need to drive myself or get, you know, food delivery is a relatively recent phenomenon. So this means that overnight, people could not legally drive to work, drive to the grocery store. A lot of jobs require that you have a valid license. A lot of people need to drive for their work, or they need to drive to different places. It is really common for job listings to say you need a valid license. So now all of a sudden, people could literally be at risk of losing their jobs, either because they no longer have that valid license, or because they just legally could not drive themselves to work. Because these are the penalty for violating this law, for basically driving with what they deem to be the wrong gender marker, is not only fines but also jail time.

Courtney: And do you wanna put money on which same-sex jail cell they’re going to put trans people in in these situations? I wonder. And of course, you can’t vote in this state if you don’t have a valid license. I guess there are some other options if you have a passport. I guess a passport is a valid photo ID for the sake of voting. But this is another fact that always sounds wild to a lot of people in other countries, but most Americans don’t have passports. Most Americans will never leave America. I think, like, 50% of Americans even have a passport, especially in Kansas, right in the middle of the country. It’s not like the states up north who are able to drive over the border to Canada or the states down south that are able to, you know, drive over to Mexico or hop on a cruise ship from a coast. Like, I would assume— and I don’t have numbers to back this up, I’m just talking— but I would assume of all the states, Kansas probably has a lower than average percentage of people with a passport.

Royce: That’s an interesting thought. I’ve never looked up state-by-state percentages, but I was just trying to think. What is it, 3 hours via plane to either coast? Something like that?

Courtney: Yeah, something like that.

Royce: It’d be– it’d be less than that north to south, just because of the shape of our country, but.

Courtney: Right. What shape would you call that? We can’t say it’s America-shaped because then South America is going to be like, “What are we, chopped liver?” We could say it’s freedom-shaped, but no! They’re taking our freedoms away!

Royce: I mean, the bounding box is a rectangle that’s wider than it is tall if we ignore Hawaii and Alaska, which happens a lot.

Courtney: And even our own president ignores Puerto Rico.

Courtney: Now, the reason too why I think it’s so important for us to consider this law and others like it being passed alongside all of this ICE activity, as I mentioned earlier, birth certificates being invalidated at a time where we know there are American citizens who have been wrongfully detained and murdered by the federal government. The actual history of, like, mass license bans in this country is not very long or expansive. It’s very recent. And as far as I can tell, it has been solely to target immigrants in other states. Florida, for instance, in 2023 made a law that went into effect on July 1st. They didn’t even have the ‘make this happen immediately’ like Kansas did so aggressively. They basically immediately invalidated out-of-state driver’s licenses held by undocumented immigrants.

Courtney: Basically saying, if you’re an undocumented immigrant and you have a valid license in Georgia and you drive over the state line and you come down to Florida, we the state of Florida are going to invalidate that. Definitely targeting immigrants. Not as immediate or aggressive as this Kansas trans license ban. California also did a similar thing for immigrants who are holders of commercial driver’s licenses. So think people driving large delivery trucks, semis. California revoked over 17,000 of those but basically only after their legal work authorization dates came up. So if they had, you know, sort of a time limit for their work visa in the country, but they issued a driver’s license— let’s say they’re allowed to work in the country for 5 years, totally random year, but the average license doesn’t expire for 7 years. They basically said, “Oh, you have a valid license for longer than you have authorization to work in this country. So we’re going to revoke your commercial driving license after your, basically, work visa or work authorization expires.”

Courtney: And as far as this country is concerned, instances like that of revoking licenses en masse targeting immigrants are the only ones I can find. And while I don’t like the idea of just revoking licenses of any kind en masse – because let’s think about every time they purge voter rolls, they always purge voter rolls with people who are fully legal and eligible to vote – there’s at least some amount of the average person is going to see common sense in this. Like, California was just commercial driver’s license and they’re like, “Hey, if you aren’t authorized to work in this country any longer, we aren’t going to give you a commercial driver’s license for longer than that date is. That was our bad, we’re gonna go ahead and revoke any of those that are, you know, longer.” It wasn’t just widely targeting anyone and everyone who’s an immigrant. Like this situation here in Kansas was basically anyone and everyone who is transgender, with the mild exception that you actually changed your documents, kind of.

Courtney: Now, I haven’t seen this talked about on as wide of a scale as the license being revoked itself, this bill. But locally speaking, there are absolutely people whose license have been revoked who are transgender who have not ever changed their gender marker on their license. And that’s terrifying. Because that’s bringing up all these questions about how does the state of Kansas know that this person is transgender, and how did this person get targeted when the point behind this bill was to make sure everybody has a license with their sex assigned at birth? I have heard anecdotally of at least 4 cases of this happening in the state of Kansas. I will link this article, as well as any other that is talking about any of the issues we’re discussing today in the usual places: the show notes on our website and the description box if you’re listening on YouTube.

Courtney: This article says, “She’d never changed her gender marker. Kansas invalidated her license anyway.” We have here a transgender Kansan, Andrea Ellis, who received one of these letters saying that her license would become invalid immediately. And she was, you know, as a politically engaged resident of the state of Kansas, knew that this law was getting shoved through, but didn’t think it would actually come for her because she never changed her gender marker. She did change her legal name. Her name was legally changed to— they’re calling her Andrea Ellis in the article, I imagine that is her legal name. And so in January, when she changed her legal name, she specifically declined to change her gender marker because she was afraid of this happening.

Courtney: So her gender marker, incorrectly, but because of her own decision to not change it, said male. She got a letter saying your license is invalid immediately. So she went to the DMV on that day, and by her account, the DMV had, like, no idea what to do. And I can just see this, right? Like, DMV employees already have to deal with so much. They’re already, like, the most miserable creatures on the planet. [laughs] Like, that’s the stereotype, is like the government employee who hates their job. And is bored and dying inside and has to deal with everybody who hates being there and everybody’s angry and upset to be at the DMV, so they have to like, take the brunt of all these emotions.

Royce: I don’t know that’s a stereotype, but the last time I was in a DMV, we have a thing where you can get in line on your phone, and then they just text you when you’re up, so you can basically just drive into the DMV, walk in, and go straight to the front of the line.

Courtney: Kansas is like the best state I have ever observed or heard from anybody else for DMVs. Like, I will give Kansas that.

Royce: And the guy was making small talk and was just talking to me about video games. He was like, “Man, it seems like no one picks up the sticks anymore. What happened?”

Courtney: The sticks? [laughs] No, I– I will say that, like, that is the stereotype, and I have heard that that is what it’s like in Missouri. That absolutely was what it was like in South Dakota. Kansas, for the most part, we do have the easiest, smoothest DMV experience that I’ve ever heard of in this country. And I’m grateful for that every time I have to go, but I’m still not trying to go any more often than I have to. So this poor woman walks into the DMV and they all have no idea what to even do about this. She said it was very clear that none of them have gotten trained on what to do when all of a sudden a flood of trans Kansans come in and are like, “Hey, the state of Kansas just decided to say no to my license, give me another one.”

Royce: Well, yeah, politicians that write laws like these don’t care about that.

Courtney: No, they don’t! It’s about punishing trans people. It’s not about actually making efficient government processes that are consistent with their fucked-up worldviews. So they basically took her license, which had her legal name on it, says Andrea Ellis, says male, They cut it up, handed her a temporary paper license that said exactly the same thing. Then she went to go try to volunteer to drive other trans Kansans. And that’s another thing that’s been happening. There have been local organizations who are trying to put together teams of volunteers of people to drive trans Kansans to the DMV and back. Also just locally in social groups, like, all my groups of people, like, we’ve been texting our trans friends like, “Hey, do you need a ride? I’m available.” Little acts of marginalized community resilience that we’re unfortunately seeing every day in this country.

Courtney: So Ellis then drives over 40 minutes away to volunteer at one of these events to— she drives to El Dorado, Kansas to do this. And by the time she gets there, she realizes the DMV had been attempting to call her while she was driving. And they basically said, “Hey, wait, you have to come back, there’s still a flag on your license.” So she had to go all the way back, still with an invalid license that if she had been picked up could have meant jail time, only for them to hand her a second paper ID that said exactly the same information. Her same name, same gender marker. Because they didn’t train the employees on what to do! The employees had no idea what they were supposed to do in this situation. And this is one instance, one DMV, and an especially strange choice because she never changed her gender marker to female.

Courtney: She may have wanted to, but because of the political climate, she made the specific decision not to. And I know of another– another Kansan, a trans man in this instance, who for a long time did not actually change his gender marker on his IDs because he just didn’t feel the need to. But he noticed over time being visibly a man, you know, beard, masculine, showing his ID as often as you need to– You need to show your ID to get into clubs, sometimes to get into bars, to buy alcohol. If you’re on the Missouri side, you can buy weed now. There are lots of situations, casually, that you need to show someone your ID. And people were very confused to see him, what he looks like, his picture, and to have the little F on his license.

Royce: Was the picture up to date at least?

Courtney: Yeah.

Royce: Okay, I was gonna say, if the picture wasn’t up to date, I could see people thinking it was a fake license.

Courtney: Well, and that was exactly the situation. He had people accuse him of, like, identity fraud or identity theft, or there’s something wrong, or this isn’t a valid license. Because oftentimes, like, bouncers at the club, for instance, they often get it wrong as to whether or not someone’s license is real and valid. Especially if it’s from out of state, like, all the time, they’re just untrained people looking at licenses and don’t really know what to look for. So he eventually caved and did change his gender marker because of all the additional scrutiny, questions, harassment, questions of identity fraud that he was getting because it confuses people. The average person who isn’t in community with trans people, if you see someone who is so obviously a man, and you learn that their license says female, you’re gonna be really confused.

Courtney: And most, most people, like, then he— like, there are situations where a trans man in that situation might be accused of being a trans woman. Like, that happens too! [laughs] And like, I’ve long questioned, even before, you know, changing gender markers or names got to be so contentious in the way it currently is, I’ve long wondered what the utility of most of the things on our licenses are. My license right now has all perfectly valid information. I had a completely different haircut and color when I took that picture. And that confuses people. The number of times I’ve had people, like, do a triple quadruple check or just, like, stare at my face for a very long period of time because they can’t quite tell if I’m— like, it’s just a hair change. That is it.

Royce: What’s the renewal period? Is it 6 or 7 years on a driver’s license?

Courtney: Well, I’ve been saying 7, but now you have me wondering.

Royce: I think it is 7. I think 7 is correct.

Courtney: But yeah, just think, in 7 years, has your hair changed? Has your weight changed?

Royce: Particularly when you think about the number of licenses you’ve had issued. It’s like, you know, early learner’s permit, maybe 15, 16 or so, or maybe it’s like a restricted into a learner’s permit or something like that. Like, there are 2 or 3 different early licenses, and then you get a real license at 18, and then you get a different license at 21. So it’s easy for you to identify if you can, like, buy alcohol. And so you get all those pretty quickly, but then you go from 21 to 28.

Courtney: Yeah, exactly. Yes. That is how it goes. And but– Yeah, like, in those 7 years, has your weight changed? Has your hair changed? Has your address changed? For a lot of people, their genders have changed. A lot can happen in 7 years. And I was so shocked the last time I had to have my license renewed that I didn’t have to change my address because I was used to moving around a lot when I was growing up. So the fact that, wow, I’ve lived in the same place for 7 years was baffling to me. But even still, people do spend a lot of extra time staring at my face and my license every time I have to give it. And that is— yeah, like, I’m not in bars and clubs super frequently, but that’s an instance where you have to show your license.Traveling, getting on a plane. There are all kinds of things.

Courtney: And like, you have to show your ID to get loans if you’re trying to buy a house, if you’re trying to buy a car. All kinds of things that all of a sudden trans people in Kansas cannot do unless they surrender their current license and/or birth certificate. And gosh, I mean, even just thinking about passports, like, applying for a passport is such a process. You have to mail, like, scans of your license. You might even need your birth certificate for that. There are all kinds of things. And you need to use snail mail. You need to wait sometimes several months depending on where you are and when it is. And I’m just thinking of, like, any of these people who have started one of these lengthy processes or is in, like, the process of getting a mortgage and buying a home. There are all kinds of things where it can take months from beginning to end and if you have a different license when you ended versus when you started, that could be a problem.

Courtney: There was actually a big hiccup with some financial paperwork we were doing when I changed my name. I had a name change and I had to give them one license to start the process, but then like a month later when we’re about to end, I had to be like, “Oh wait, I have a new name. Everything has to change now. Here’s the new license. Here’s the new— da da da.” So everyone, of course, in the situation like Ellis here and others like her who never actually changed their gender marker, they’re saying, “How could the state of Kansas have known? Why did they do this?” The theory is that the system got flagged because of the name change. And there are lots of reasons why people might change their name. You can just change your name for the hell of it if you want to.

Courtney: I knew someone who literally changed his middle name to Danger, like, the day he turned 18. He applied to do that just so he could say, “Danger is my middle name.” I knew someone who changed their first name to a single letter. Just because he didn’t like the name he was born with. That’s all. Just single letter. But predominantly women and predominantly cis straight women are often changing their last names when entering into a marriage. And that was a big point of contention for a lot of the voting restriction bullshit that Republicans are trying to do, not only in individual states but at a federal level right now. I’m thinking to the SAVE Act, where if it goes through, is going to literally say, “Yeah, you need a photo ID to vote, but that’s also not good enough.” One of the examples was, “Bring your photo ID and your birth certificate, and they have to match.”

Courtney: And a lot of married women all over the country were like, “Wait a second, my name doesn’t match my birth certificate. Why would it?” Not to mention the fact that there are a lot of cultures whose naming conventions are not that of the, you know, Western white template of names that our government documents and forms and websites try to restrict people to. A lot of, you know, Asian countries will do family names first. There are lots of cultures who have multiple last names or multiple middle names. I had an indigenous friend who had 5 middle names. And a lot of government documents just don’t actually account for a lot of those naming conventions, so sometimes, there will be weird things that happen. Someone might have two last names that maybe some forms will say both last names, and maybe some will only take like the last, last name. And so they might not match, but it’s still the same person. But that is a pitfall of the government forms that don’t accommodate naming conventions like that.

Courtney: So when I changed my name, it was very easy. You do normally have to appear before a judge in most states. Every state is a little bit different about what you have to do to go through the process, but I was already known by this name before then, but I legally had it changed in, like, early days of the pandemic. So all court was on Zoom, so I didn’t even have to leave my house. I just had to have a Zoom call with the judge and be like, “Judge, can this be my legal name, please?” And he was like, “Why?” And I was like, “Everyone already knows me by this.” And he’s like, “Great, you’re good to go. I’ll email you the paperwork that I e-signed.” And it was wonderful.

Courtney: And I was actually thinking– And I still might do it at some point given everything we know now, I’m glad I haven’t done it yet. But I was thinking of doing an episode about sort of legally changing your name. I obviously can’t give legal advice and every state is gonna be different and of course different countries will be different and I don’t know all the nuances of that. But there are some things I learned in hindsight where it’s like, oh, maybe I should have changed my name earlier because of this, or this is a thing I didn’t realize I had to change after the fact. And so I kind of wanted to just do an episode about like all the things I wish I knew before I had my name legally changed in court to try to make it easier for anyone else who is also going to do a similar thing.

Courtney: And I’m kind of glad I didn’t yet, because I would have absolutely said, “The main thing is I wish I did this sooner.” And that as blanket advice, or a blanket piece of wisdom, is not going to be appropriate for everyone right now in this day and age with the things happening. It still might be for some. But now I would do that episode with a lot more— I don’t want to say political paranoia. [laughs] But, I don’t think it would be incorrect to call it that. But because I have legally changed my name for a reason that was not just got married, I absolutely went to check to see if my license was still valid after hearing that people who change their name are publicly and socially known to be queer people have had their license invalidated. Of course I was looking to see.

Courtney: And mine was fine. I looked up yours too. I was like, you never changed a gender marker, but you’ve spoken a lot about having a lack of a gender identity, and who knows what this government is doing. And at this point, we really do. I mean, I’ve heard a lot of people say like, oh, they’ve got a transgender registry and they’ve got a list of trans people in Kansas. I just have to assume at this point that the government just knows everything about all of us. Does that sound overly paranoid? Like, they’re— with internet activity and data being bought and sold all over the place, and with heightened surveillance, we’re getting articles every other day about ICE surveilling people and their online activity.

Royce: I mean, it is possible, particularly with some newer AI systems, that data is being aggregated and used in some capacity. Like, if you’re able to tie social media accounts to a government identification to double-check things, but, is that what’s actually happening here? I don’t know. Is it a case that some other marker cued this off for these 4 examples? Potentially. Is it a case that this was a ham-fisted law that was thrown in and that there are licenses that were invalidated just because of cracks in the system and that this was just a coincidence? Potentially. Like, who knows? I don’t have enough information to see a pattern, and a lot of things are technically possible.

Courtney: A lot of things are technically possible. And like, that’s another thing too. More and more social media sites are requiring IDs for use, which is also an attempt to take away more rights of minors. They’re trying to ban minors from public areas of the internet and remove them from society. So it really all is the same fight. It’s the same problem. The fact that our lawmakers feel so comfortable taking away so many rights so immediately, overnight, to an entire group of people is terrifying. A lot of people have been, you know, making parallels to the executive order in Germany that invalidated— and not necessarily driver’s license, it was a very different time, you know, 1930s Germany is very different than 2020s Kansas in terms of what we all have licenses for, but revoked licenses for doctors to practice, lawyers to practice if they were Jewish.

Courtney: I don’t even want to say it and put it out into the world, but like, my natural thought process is, it’s like, okay, it doesn’t actually feel like that big of a jump that in today’s day and age that they might say, you know, trans people can’t be pediatricians. Because they’re trying to ban trans healthcare and there are all of these articles we’ve been seeing for years about how trans people can’t be trusted around children or drag queens can’t be around children. Like, revoking rights to targeted groups of people. And with the pre-existing license revoking laws being predominantly targeting immigrants, with the current political climate, that’s also terrifying. Are they going to blanketly revoke licenses for immigrants, whether or not they are here legally, whether or not they have green cards, whether or not it’s a commercial driver’s license?

Courtney: All of a sudden, it doesn’t feel like that is outside of the realm of possibility. And since they’re revoking licenses of trans people who have simply changed their names, and not even the gender marker, are they going to disallow trans people from changing their name in the future? And if they do that, I don’t see a way they could do it without creating some sort of arbitrary, you know, naming rule, like, you have to have a boy name, or you have to have a girl name, and here’s what they are. Of course, there have always been gender-neutral names.

Royce: Either that, or they restrict all name changes to marriage.

Courtney: Yes. Which, I’m sure they’d be, uh, really happy to do that. I think that’s another thing Germany did. I think they required all Jewish Germans to have, quote, ‘Jewish names’. That is also a thing that happened. It is terrifying, but there are so many resilient people here in this state that we are trying our very best to take care of one another, to look out for each other. But we’re scared. We are scared. So many of my closest friends have something to be worried about. Whether they are trans, whether they are queer, whether they are immigrants, or simply politically active People of Color, like, I— we’re all having a bad time. I might still end up doing a name change episode if there is interest, because I have my personal experience, I have lots of friends who have changed their name, some for reasons of trans identity, some otherwise.

Courtney: And when you do change your name, they normally do ask you for what the reason is. And amongst my friends who have changed their name because they are trans, some have reported, “It is because I’m trans,” and others have not. Some have made up a totally different reason because they didn’t want court documentation to say, “I am trans.” Because that is another thing that has come up. If you changed your name, but the reason you changed your name was you said, “I’m trans,” is that in any way playing a part as to why the licenses were revoked? Or is the next step going to be, “We’re revoking your name change because you said your name was changed because you’re trans.” That would be a lot harder to do.

Courtney: The judicial system is a lot more complicated than that. But I mean, lawmakers are gonna try what they’re gonna try. And organizations like the ACLU are gonna sue them about it. Like, that is happening now.

Courtney: But another episode I’ve been thinking about doing, and I won’t say too much now, but there are queer organizations that I don’t think have really kept up with the times either. I have, for instance, this year, attempted to get a certification for my business that just, like, basically says “certified queer-owned,” that kind of a thing. And let me tell ya, the requirements for proving that your business is actually queer-owned, I hated it. I hated it before this legislation came up. Before this happened, I was still like, not only is this very dismissive of ace and aro folks, but this is really transmedicalist. I was very upset about it. I don’t want to talk much about it yet because I’m still having talks behind the scenes with people about this to see if there’s anything we can do to get it changed.

Courtney: But one of the things is, like, if you’re trans, one of the ways you can prove you’re trans is court-ordered documentation saying that your name was changed with the reason being you are trans. Like, we need to see the paperwork that says, “I am trans and this is why I’m changing my name.” Or they need proof that you changed your gender marker on your license! And hey, even before this got rolled back and these licenses invalidated in the state of Kansas, there were several states who already did not allow this to happen. And this is a national certification that we’re talking about. This is not Kansas exclusive. So, I already had questions and concerns about it. It would be nice if— this is not the only one, there are other exclusionary queer organizations out there. There always have been. Some are outright exclusionary of trans folks. We don’t fuck with them at all.

Courtney: But the ones that sort of try to say they’re inclusive but have these very rigid definitions of what they think a queer experience looks like… I don’t know, I’m just saying, I think maybe we gotta figure something else out, gang. [laughs] Maybe we can’t rely on government documentation to prove our queerness. Maybe we never could. We need to come to terms with the fact that we are past the, albeit misguided, but very real Obama-era of optimism, and things have already been getting bad for a while, and now they are properly terrifying. I do not begrudge any of my trans peers who have either already moved out of the country or are actively trying to do so right now. But for those of us for whom that is either not an option or not of interest, now really, really is the time that if you have ever been considering getting more politically involved, do it today. I won’t sugarcoat it. It should have been yesterday. It should have been last week. It should have been last year. Find real life, real world ways to help. Because just posting about your concerns online is not enough.

Courtney: With that being said, of course it feels right for us to feature a transgender member of our MarketplACE to be our featured vendor. This is a trans aroace shop who goes by CloudSpool on Etsy, where you can find handmade accessories for you and your plushie friends. If you want something for yourself, you can get some cute little candy bracelets. Some of them are Pride colors if you want to get the colors of the Trans flag, the Ace flag, the Aro flag. I see the Aroace flag too, Bi, Pan, all kinds of color options here. Or you can just pick out your favorite colors. There are some non-Pride ones here that are just pretty bracelets. And there’s also a little fiber art here. Some very cute little scarves and blankets that are plushie-sized. Also available in a variety of colors. Links to find CloudSpool are of course gonna be in all the usual places, the show notes on our website as well as the description box on YouTube. That is gonna be all for today. As always, thank you all so much for being here, and we’ll talk to you all next time.