In the New Year, transgender Kansans will likely have their legal ID messed with in some way. Kansans were briefly allowed the privilege of changing their gender markers for the first time in 2019. This came after a court case won that transgender people under the equal protection clause should be able to change gender markers on state documents. In 2022, the legislature, through typically underhanded means, put a kibosh on gender marker changes. This was fought rather languidly by a court case for the following three years, and this fall, trans Kansans won that court case.
The basic argument about gender marker changes goes like this: in order for trans people to blend into society, their documents need to be updated. The anti-trans argument asserts that passing is a sort of deception that is harmful to the general public and must be stopped. There is little deviation from this argument in the coverage of trans issues, even though I have yet to meet a trans person who is intent on “going stealth.” In fact, most trans people are extremely suspicious of the concept, and there is plenty of conversation on the trans internet that going stealth is too harmful to trans people’s mental health, so they recommend against it. It seems that both sides of this issue are arguing over an imaginary trans person.
As a trans person and a person who certainly knows more trans people than your average legislator, legally changing your gender doesn’t come up that much. I have changed my name legally, which decreased some friction between me and the administrative state. However, even before I had changed my name, I was going by my preferred name at school and work. Many people were none the wiser that I had a second secret name. Most trans people I know have not changed anything legally. Even if it was possible in Kansas to change from M to F, that would not accommodate nonbinary people, who make up a significant portion of trans people.
Some states and countries have introduced a nonbinary gender marker, which I think is absurd. Not because I have any objection to a nonbinary gender, I just don’t see what business the state has in knowing I’m queer. At least an M or F can plausibly be not queer, but an X seems more regressive than progressive. Not only are people outed to every government official, but any document that conflicts because of different state/federal laws is another opportunity for discrimination.
The really progressive thing to do would be to eliminate gender on ID altogether. What the government puts on ID is political, not a neutral fact. If the government discriminates against a particular religion, they put everyone's religion on their ID, for example. Eliminating gender on IDs would reflect a commitment to gender equality.
That commitment does not currently exist. Literally no one in power is suggesting an elimination of legal sex, even prominent trans people. This is because the state has an interest in segregating people. The widespread acceptance of trans people and the increasing gender-consciousness of the population show that it is losing the battle to segregate men and women. Gender markers are one of the few things that the state still has to enforce the barrier with violence.
I do not think that the state will take a more active approach to enforcing gender in the near future. It is currently occupied by persecuting people who dare to cross borders. We have seen through these ICE raids that it makes little difference whether a person has correct documentation; if a person looks a certain way, they are arrested. It would likely be the same for gender-based prosecution.
While the state is temporarily distracted from its favorite moral panic, Trans and queer people need to take a more accurate analysis of the situation and understand that, for whatever reason, they are not actually the center of attention. There have been claims that we are in the midst of a “trans genocide.” This argument usually rests on an allusion to the Holocaust, as that is the only genocide Americans are taught, because it is the only one America did not have a hand in perpetuating.
But let's get some things straight. While sexual perverts were a target of the Nazis, only Germans were targeted specifically for this “perversion”. Sexual perversion, or gender deviance, or however you want to call that mess of non-conformity, sometimes referred to as “queer,” only needs to be cleansed from an otherwise “pure” population. When Nazis discuss gay men as “effeminate,” they mean to say, “feminine despite their being otherwise an Aryan man.”
Other racial groups, in a white supremacist world, are assumed to be sexually impure, and sexual impurity in white people (or German people, or French people, or whatever) is a contamination of supposedly ideal characteristics. It is also noteworthy that the German state, like all other Western nations at the time, was imprisoning gay people before 1933 and continued to imprison them after 1945. America, of course, has only had legal sodomy for about 22 years.
If there is a genocide of queer people, it has been going on for quite some time. In fact, I argue that the oppression of sexual and gender deviance is an inherent part of class oppression. When the government has a vested interest in persecuting the working class, trans people will also be at risk, as members of the working class. If the state did not have that interest, trans people would likely not be at risk. Instead of trying to carve out a group of trans people that will be safe as long as they follow the appropriate procedures, we should focus on the liberation of all people. So, abolish gender markers, and class society along with it.
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