Kansas revocation of Trans IDs evokes Nazi policy towards Jewish IDs

I cannot say for sure if the Kansas legislators who voted to mark our passports as distinct have similar intentions. However, their actions and beliefs about trans people have the same logical endpoint as those which led to the Holocaust.

By Jane Migliara Brigham

The state of Kansas has enacted a bill to revoke the IDs of trans people, only allowing them to hold state-issued IDs meant to mark them as trans to anyone inspecting the document.

This is done by adding a legal requirement that all state-issued IDs have sex markers that correspond to a person’s sex as determined at birth. Any previous IDs issued by the state which do not meet this requirement are to be invalidated. Virtually all people whose IDs this new rule would apply to are trans.

This rule puts this latest law in a category of its own regarding anti-trans legislation. Unlike the thousands of anti-trans bills and executive orders since 2021, none have actively taken away existing identification. 

Not even the executive order which limited the providing of passports to only display the bearer's sex as assigned at birth went as far as to revoke existing passports which do not comply with the new rule. 

This is in stark contrast to how Kansas plans to enact their new rule. 

The law orders the Director of the Kansas Department of Revenue (which oversees the granting of driver’s licenses) to identify all people granted a driver’s license (or other ID) with a gender marker that does not correspond to the sex they were assigned at birth, a stipulation that applies almost exclusively to trans people. 

It then orders that these licenses be invalidated, ordering the bearers to surrender their old licenses, at which time they will be provided a new license that has the wrong gender marker.

There is no part of that which isn't concerning.

Firstly, it requires the government to make a list of all people to whom this would apply to. Since the requirements are meant to only include a hated minority group, the government is essentially making a list of those which it views as its internal enemies.

Second, it required that the affected IDs be invalidated. This leaves those trans people who previously had safe IDs with no means of accurately representing themselves. 

Since the primary means of identification for most Americans is their driver’s license, this would also mean taking away their legal right to drive a car, which is required for most daily tasks. Being able to drive is also a requirement for many jobs, and having a valid driver’s license is a requirement for many types of public services.

Third, the affected trans people would be forced to surrender their now invalidated IDs as a means of obtaining new ones. This serves to remove from circulation any existing IDs that do not misgender the trans people in question.

Lastly, these trans people will be provided with new IDs whose sex markers are based on what they were assigned at birth, rather than what their body (or appearance) would suggest today. 

To an outside observer viewing such an ID seeing a person that appears to be one sex/gender, but whose ID marks them as the opposite is a dead giveaway that the person is trans. From there, they are marked out as different from the general population, and can then be treated differently based on whatever prejudices the reader sees fit or whatever discriminatory laws are relevant.

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But why go through all this trouble? After all, IDs have to be renewed every few years, at which point they can be changed so that the sex marker can be used to out trans people every time we have to present ID.

I can’t say for sure, but I think that the most likely reason is that they want us to be as visible to the authorities as possible, as quickly as possible. To paraphrase a favorite term of the transphobes, they want to make sure that they can ‘always tell’ when a trans person is present.

To understand the motivations at play here, you have to understand that Republican officials have been attempting to compile a list of trans people for years.

In Texas, the office of the Attorney General has spent years assembling a list of trans people, primarily using data gathered from drivers licenses and other public records. In several states, the Attorneys General offices have used the cover of malpractice investigations to obtain unredacted lists of young patients getting trans healthcare. In essence, they are getting around medical privacy laws to gather a list of trans people.

This leads to a further question: why do Republican governments need to do so much work to compile such a list? The simple answer is that the US government does not normally keep track of the information which would be used to compile such a list. 

The census and other government surveys typically lists attributes such as race, ethnicity, income, state of origin, and the like. It was only recently that the census announced that it would add sexuality and gender identity to this list. However, the next general census is not until 2030, and the full results of it might not be available until 2031 or 2032. Given the new questions in the census, they might then be able to make a list of trans people from that (assuming they have access to the raw data, which would either require changing or violating current privacy laws).

Republicans appear unwilling to wait that long. In several states, they are known to be assembling lists of trans people. Kansas is laying the groundwork to join them.

As for what they plan to do with this list, we don’t know. We have vague hints about ‘removing transgenderism from public life’, but no concrete plans for doing so are available to the public. 

We know that they want us gone, but not how they plan to accomplish this.

However, we can compare the policies they are pursuing to those of past governments who hold similar attitudes towards their minority populations. Which other governments have pursued policies meant to make its hated minorities more visible to any state official who comes across them?

In 1938, Germany enacted a series of laws to make the carrying of IDs mandatory for all residents above a certain age. Of note to our case is how these new IDs were used to make clear who deserved the full respect of those around them and who did not.

The Nazi government of the time used the opportunity to make the Jews receiving their papers as easy to identify as possible. From that point on, all identification documents issued to Jews were stamped with a large ‘J’ to show that they were Jewish. In addition, any Jew whose name ‘passed’ as being of German origin was forced to add the names “Israel” or “Sara” to the beginning of their legal names.

In all dealings with state officials, Jews were required to identify themselves as Jews, and could be forced to present their new IDs for inspection by any government official for any reason.

The next year, the same policy was applied all passports held by German Jews, subjecting them to the same outing to public officials even when they left the country.

We know what happened next. These documents were used to identify Jews as separate from the wider population, and would ultimately be used to enact a genocide against them. Most people whose papers were stamped with the letter ‘J’ in 1938 were dead by 1945.

However, before this, their paperwork was used as part of an ongoing process to humiliate them. Any time they were in the presence of a state official, they were forced to out themselves. This was done so that they could be more easily identified as the outgroup which the wider German society sought to remove from public life.

These policies of making it so outsiders could ‘always tell’ who was a Jew were later expanded to require them to wear yellow stars. This policy has been more present in the public imagination because it can be seen from photographs of the time. However, to the state officials who organized these policies, the yellow star was only a continuation of the existing policy of visual exclusion, little different in its underlying motivations.

Any attempt by the government, however small, to alter the documentation of a hated minority population can expand far beyond its original scope, and lead to murderous consequences.

The policy which Kansas legislators are embarking on is structurally similar to those which laid the foundations of the Holocaust. It is also obvious that the Republican party views trans people as chief among their internal enemies, as reflected in their hatred of us. It should also be noted that the regime is constructing a series of concentration camps with the stated goal of removing a different group of its internal enemies from the society (undocumented immigrants).

I cannot say for sure if the Kansas legislators who voted to mark our passports as distinct have similar intentions. However, their actions and beliefs about trans people have the same logical endpoint as those which led to the Holocaust.