An increasing number of other Republican-run states are lining up to discriminate against transgender men and women, so why not Sam Brownback's Kansas?
State authorities are considering new rules that would make it extremely difficult if not totally impossible for a transgender person to update a birth certificate to reflect their identity.
Reading this was not the first time I cursed at my screen today, but it may have been the loudest.
The department's revised rules would allow a change only if a person or his or her parents could document that the gender was incorrectly recorded at the time of birth. [...]
Republican Kansas state Sen. Mary Pilcher-Cook said a birth certificate is "a record for future generations" and shouldn't be changed lightly. She said the document should reflect the "science" behind a person's gender and not "political purposes."
The "science."
Republicans wouldn't know science if Sir Isaac Newton's apple hit them on the head. They don't care about the science behind transgender identity, or homosexuality, or climate change, or evolution, or abortion, or even the goddamn tides.
"Tide comes in. Tide goes out. You can't explain it."
You can bet their criteria for documenting that a gender was "incorrectly recorded" is just as nonsensical and scientifically-challenged as their views on basically everything else.
Lawmakers in other states pushing anti-transgender legislation have said transgender people should undergo reassignment surgery and update their birth certificates if they want to use an appropriate restroom but, as lawmakers in Kansas have now shown us, that will be the next thing they come for.
They want to legislate transgender people out of existence or at least out of all public sight.