Sometimes the news that comes from across the ocean seems like something out of a dystopian novel, but unfortunately it is very real and has devastating consequences. The new administration of Donald Trump has stepped on the accelerator in its crusade against LGTBIQ+ rights, and this time, the epicenter of the setback is located in Kansas. Can you imagine opening your mailbox and discovering that you have lost your right to drive simply for being who you are?
This is no longer an abstract threat; It is the reality that hundreds of people in the United States face under the pretext of a new and aggressive transphobic regulation.
Letters, fines and the cancellation of identity
The institutional machinery in Kansas, driven by the Republican majority, has begun to send official notifications to transgender citizens. The message is clear and emphatic: their driver’s licenses have been invalidated.
The legal excuse is based on the first paragraph of a new guideline that requires that identification documents issued by the State “reflect the sex of the holder as assigned at birth.” This means that all those people who had managed, after long and costly processes, to make their true gender identity official on their cards, now see how the State erases that recognition with a stroke of a pen.
And the consequences of disobeying are not minor. If a trans person decides to get behind the wheel with their current license, they face disproportionate penalties:
- Up to six months in prison.
- Financial sanctions that reach $1,000.
It is, in practice, a total paralysis of daily life. Without a driving license in a country designed for cars, going to work, shopping or going to the doctor becomes an act of extreme risk.
Fear as a multimillion-dollar political weapon
To understand this extreme measure, we cannot look at Kansas in isolation. It all responds to Donald Trump’s election promise to “stop the transgender madness.” The White House strategy has consisted of turning a vulnerable minority into the great national enemy, investing a whopping $215 million in advertising campaigns designed to sow panic.
The official discourse, harsh and constant, has been articulated around three axes to demonize the community:
- Panic in sports: Through massive advertisements broadcast during major competitions, the false narrative has been constructed that trans women pose a threat to the future of girl athletes, thus justifying their total expulsion.
- Terror in the locker room: Unfounded fears have been instilled in families, suggesting non-existent dangers in intimate spaces to generate social rejection from the base.
- The criminalization of the group: In his rallies, Trump has come to directly associate trans people with crime, using the marginal argument of transitions in the prison system to paint the group as a threat to public safety.
A space for reflection
The trans community represents only 0.5% of the total population of the United States. Given this figure, I ask you a question for you to reflect on, reader: How is it possible that such a small percentage of citizens become the nerve center of the policies of the most powerful nation in the world? What does this tell us about the political use of culture wars to divert public attention from real structural problems?
The hunt has begun for driver’s licenses in Kansas, but history has taught us that when the identity of a human group begins to be legally erased, the limits of what the State is willing to do disappear.
