The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Welcome everyone to the Real News Network podcast. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the editor-in-chief here at The Real News, and it’s so great to have you all with us. Between the federal government’s coverup of the Epstein Files, President Trump’s catastrophic decision to plunge the US into a war with Iran, an economy that’s crushing working people while hurling money at billionaires and corporations, and the daily litany of rampant and jaw-droppingly blatant corruption throughout the Trump administration. Even Trump’s base of supporters is beginning to fracture, and Republicans are fixing to get slammed in the upcoming midterm elections. And right on cue, as their public approval sinks lower and lower, the MAGA right is leaning harder and harder into policies of abject cruelty directed at vulnerable populations that have been turned into sacrificial scapegoats. That is especially true when it comes to immigrants and trans people. In the state of Kansas, the war on the rights and lives of trans people escalated to new, horrifying heights in recent weeks.

As Sherman Smith and Morgan Chilson write in the Kansas Reflector, “The Kansas Department of Revenue sent a letter in late February to Kansans affected by a new law, which took effect Thursday that requires the gender marker on a driver’s license to match a person’s sex at birth. The letter informs TransKansans that because the legislature didn’t include a grace period for updating credentials, they are invalid immediately and “You may be subject to additional penalties if you are operating a vehicle without a valid credential.” A spokesman for the agency told Kansas Reflector the law invalidated about 1,700 licenses. The letter directed TransKansans to surrender their driver’s license to the state before they can receive a new one, which will cost them $8. Republicans in the legislature placed transgender Kansans in their crosshairs at the start of this year’s session. The House Judiciary Committee scheduled a hearing with less than 24 hours notice on the second day of the session for a bill that would invalidate their driver’s license.

The bill was a response to a Kansas Court of Appeals ruling last year that determined there was no harm in letting people change their gender markers, which Kansans have done since at least 2002 with no complaints. A week after the rushed hearing in a flurry of procedural maneuvers, the committee took action on the bill without warning. Republicans added language that would make it illegal for someone to use a public building bathroom or similar space like a locker room that conflicts with their sex at birth. They then inserted the contents of the House Bill into an unrelated Senate bill that passed the year before. That allowed the House and Senate to pass Senate Bill 244 the next day without ever holding a public hearing on the bathroom provision. And listen, that’s not all. As journalists and LGBTQ+ policy analyst Erin Reed reports, the Kansas law “also empowers private citizens to act as bounty hunters, seeking out transgender people in bathrooms, including private business ones and suing them for substantial sums of money.” Now, this new anti-trans law in Kansas is extreme, but sadly, it is not an outlier.

Erin Reed has been diligently tracking the explosion of laws and policies around the country that explicitly target the rights of trans people and punish them for existing. And she joins us on the podcast today. Erin, thank you so much for speaking with me today on the real news. I really appreciate it and I really, really wish we were meeting under less horrifying circumstances, but I want to jump right in and ask if you can break down for listeners, what the heck is happening with this anti-trans law in Kansas? Where did it come from? What does it do and how is it affecting the lives of people in the state?

Erin Reed:

Thank you so much for having me on. And you’re right. It seems like it just gets worse and worse every single month. And as more revelations come out in the Epstein files and as the chaos gets unleashed in the world by this current administration, it feels like they continue to stamp the trans hate button harder and harder and harder, trying to make sure that those red lights are flashing. The Kantas Bill is probably the most egregious example of all of this, and it harms trans people in unspeakable ways in the state. Right now, there are people who are fleeing the state, people who are moving out on moments notice right now because they can no longer live there, not comfortably, not reasonably. You mentioned many of the things that this bill does. It prevents legal transition. The act of changing your gender marker documents was what allowed us to legally transition in America, and that is no longer allowed in Kansas.

And what’s worse, all of the people that had, some of them years ago, were given letters overnight saying that you had to get to the DMV and exchange your license for an incorrect license. One that was your current license was no longer active anymore. It was rescinded. You had to surrender it to the DMV. But the thing is, is that you couldn’t even drive to the DMV to surrender your license because it was invalidated overnight. And if you’re caught driving on the suspended license, you lose your driving privileges for three to six months, you could be thrown in jail. This is the bind that trans people are in the state. What’s worse, if you’re driving around and you need to stop to use the bathroom somewhere, all it takes is one person who sees you and thinks you don’t belong somewhere and they can bring a lawsuit against you up to two years later.

So even if they didn’t know that you were trans whenever they initially saw you, but they read somewhere online that, oh, that person was actually transgender, they can bring a lawsuit two years down the line for what damages? You were just a person who didn’t harm a single person. You’re just trying to use the bathroom. In practice, this has a crescendo of effects on transgender people in Kansas. You have it so that trans people have to plan every time they leave from their home, what restaurants they can go to, what Starbucks are along the way so that they can find a gender neutral bathroom when they travel. And as a result, you mentioned early in your intro of me that I maintain a risk assessment map and Kansas is one of three states that are do not travel states for transgender people. It has become more dangerous to travel for trans people than what it’s worth.

And so yeah, this is the difficulties that are being faced there right now.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And it just strikes me how similar what you describe as what my own family and people in the immigrant community have described to me. The very act of going outside is basically criminalized and everything feels like a trap for you to fall in it and be disappeared into the prison industrial complex. And folks need to have solidarity there because the state is wielding its awful power against so many of us. And if we just sit there and do nothing and say, “Well, that’s not my fight. That’s not my fight.” Then who’s going to be left to fight for you when the state turns its eye to you? But I digress. I wanted to ask you, Aaron, about the fact that immediately after the bill became law in Kansas, the American Civil Liberties Union did file a lawsuit on behalf of two transgender men in Kansas.

And the lawyers have asked the court to block the law from taking effect while the case is being argued. And the lawsuit itself argues that the law violates constitutional rights to personal autonomy, privacy, equity, due process, and freedom of expression. So what can you tell us about this lawsuit and any other efforts that you’re seeing to push back against this new repressive law in Kansas?

Erin Reed:

Yeah, absolutely. So Kansas has a fairly strong constitution with strong protections. We have seen rulings in the past with respect to transgender people and gender equality. And this is something that Kansas Republicans don’t want. They want to try to strip these rights out of the state constitution and out of state laws. We did see a lawsuit filed on behalf of two transgender men who argue that they’re in a particularly egregious bind because if they go into a men’s restroom, they’re technically breaking the law and they could be sued for two years. But if they go into a women’s restroom looking the way that they do, they’re likely also to be sued and have to go through a legal filing. And so essentially they end up feeling like they’re banned from bathrooms altogether. There’s no answer for them. And that’s the same case with many transgender women as well.

And so they brought a lawsuit. Unfortunately, it seems like from what I understand, the lawsuit, the judge that they drew ended up being a Republican appointee. And so we’re going to see how that goes. Unfortunately, whenever it comes to the political appointment of a judge, that has been a pretty good indicator of how they’re going to rule for or against transgender people in this current age because the Republican Party has demonized us so heavily among their factions and among their appointees that we do see a lot of times they find against us. The good news is that in Kansas, the State Supreme Court is more progressive. And so we do hope that it gets overturned eventually. But the problem is, is that every single day that we wait while this is just sitting there is another day that transgender Kansans have to choose between surrendering their driver’s license or getting an incorrect one.

If they drive on the driver’s license that they’re waiting for a court ruling on and they get stopped, then what gives? They’re going to go to jail, they’re going to lose their driver’s license for three months. It’s an impossible decision for so many of them. And on top of that, again, you got the bathroom problems, so transgender Kansans that feel like they have to stay at home. And that’s the only thing they can do. They’re trying to strip us from our communities, and that’s what we see in Kansas.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Let’s zoom out here and put this Kansas Bill in the broader national context. Like we said, you have produced an invaluable resource in the anti-trans national legal risk assessment map on your Substack, and we’re going to link to that in the show notes for this episode, so everyone listening can go look at it. And on that page in your Substack, you write, quote, “I’ve tracked anti-transgender legislation for five years. Every day I’ve gotten messages from worried people wondering how they are supposed to assess their risk of staying in their home state. The messages range from parents of trans youth wondering if their children will be taken from them to trans teachers wondering if their jobs will be safe in coming years. Sometimes people just want to know if there is a safer state they can move to nearby.” So Aaron, I know this is a big question, but I guess taken in the macro sense, what does this map tell us about what’s actually happening in this country when it comes to anti-trans policy and laws?

Erin Reed:

Yeah. So the map is striking. You will see a divide between several states that have protective policies towards transgender people and are marked in this blue protective color and then several states that are marked in this dark red. And what I have seen since starting this years ago, I think my first map was in 2022. Things were a lot more neutral colored back then, but we have seen this sort of dichotomy where some states have become more protective and a large swath of the country that has a Republican legislature, any state with a Republican legislature has gotten redder and redder and redder, basically forcing trans people out of half of the country into the other half. And we have seen a large migration. I believe it was the Movement Advancement Project Survey that showed 480,000 to transgender people have moved from their home states over the last four years.

Transgender people are about 1% of the American public. So there are about three million of us out of the 300 something million in the United States. And so literally a good half of us have already changed states and that’s how bad it’s gotten in many of these places. The other thing that I’ll mention is that there seems to be no bottom. There’s no like we have done enough to hate trans people in these states. I mentioned earlier with all the stuff coming out, how they keep slamming the red trans button for their red meat audience. And what we have seen is that there’s never a reflection that maybe we have hit this button too many times. And that’s because they don’t see a world with us in it. It’s not a success until we are gone, until we’re absolutely out of their communities. And you don’t have to trust me on that.

You can listen to the Heritage Foundation president who just a week or two ago on a podcast specifically said that the end goal of all of this is to outlaw it for everyone. They don’t see a world where we belong in it and they want to outlaw it for everyone. This is Heritage Foundation president, Kevin Roberts, who is on the PBD podcast, the big influential conservative podcast, where he openly says like, “Yeah, this is our goal. We’re going to work on this incrementally.” And so that’s what they want

Maximillian Alvarez:

To do. Obviously, there’s a whole lot of discourse on the left and right of the political spectrum on this issue. And from the left side, from the centrist liberal kind of side, you tend to hear a number of folks kind of putting this issue down as like, “Well, there’s only three million trans people in a country of 300 million. Why do we care so much about fighting for trans people’s rights? We should just abandon that for quote unquote kitchen table issues.” And that’s a subject for another day, I suppose. But I want to kind of turn that around on the right side because couldn’t you also turn around and say like, look, we mentioned a goddamn war with Iran, the Epstein files. The economy is crushing working people while enriching the oligarch class. Why is the right so obsessed with this minority population?

Erin Reed:

Absolutely. And I think that this is maybe one of the biggest failures in Democratic leadership is not to point that out. And I think that that needs to be pointed out. In the last election, there were several attacks on Democrats and on Harris around transgender issues and we saw the ads and whatnot. And I think that one of the weakest sort of responses was the lack of a response, was the allowing the other side to define Democrats on transgender issues without any pushback, without any sort of coming to the defense of transgender people. And I think what that does is it makes it sound like they were able to paint Democrats as obsessed with trans people. Whenever it was them, they were the ones that were spending 53% of their ad dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars on trans people. And I think that in the recent election in Virginia, we finally saw a little bit of pushback on this.

We finally saw a little bit of, “Hey, you’re spending all of this money on trans people. You care about bathrooms. We care about the government shutdown and what’s going on in our hometown right now.” And you saw that Earl Sears lost that election heavily. Virginia Democrats got 64 seats. It was one of the biggest swings that we’ve ever seen. And so I do think that there is value to turning the sort of table around a little bit and saying, “Hey, look, these people, you keep on getting these ads about trans people on your television, but we’re the ones who are caring about the economy. We’re the ones that are here to help you in your day-to-day life.” And I truly don’t think that the anti-trans movement is a grassroots movement. I don’t think that there are a ton of people out there who go to the polls and who think, “I want to vote for this person because of trans people.

“That’s what I care about the most. I don’t think there are a bunch of people that are walking around in public going to the bathroom and thinking about trans people all the time. I think that what you see is this mismatch. And I think that it’s ripe for pointing that out. It’s ripe for pointing out that the obsessed people are the ones that are trying to flood the zone with this stuff every single day.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and that kind of brings us nicely to the last question. And as we always do on the real news, I want to leave people by reminding them that they are not powerless. I mean, no one can do everything, but everyone can do something to change the outcome here. And so I wanted to ask you, what is being done to combat the persecution of trans people in America? What can be done? And what message do you have for folks listening about why they should get involved in this fight and what they can do to be a part of the solution?

Erin Reed:

I think the biggest hope that I’m seeing around what is being done to combat all of this is the lack of compliance among the people that want to protect us and stand up for us. We are seeing some people say that we will not comply with your demands. We’re not going to comply with your demands that I discriminate against trans people or that I kicked them out of bathrooms or that I stopped providing their care. And it’s sad because we’ve seen a lot of colleges, a lot of prestigious colleges sort of turn over and flip to the Trump administration, places like Brown, Columbia, Harvard, Pinn. But we have also seen local school districts stand up for trans people. Look at what happened in Virginia. Five school districts, major school districts all said, no, we’re not going to discriminate against our trans students. We’re going to take you to court instead.

We saw the same thing in Denver, saw the same thing in Chicago. That’s because our public schools, the people that work in these public schools, they’re close to the community. They live with the people who they represent. And I do think that we are seeing community become a strong vector for resistance against the Trump administration and against these anti-trans demands. And what I will also add, that it’s not just resistance against anti-trans policies, but this is resistance against anti-immigration policies. It’s resistance against over policing. It’s resistance against all of the issues that we currently face in this administration and the anti-union fights and whatnot. And so I think that one of the strongest things that we can take moving forward is that no, you shouldn’t cast aside transgender people. Y shouldn’t throw us under the bus, just like you shouldn’t throw migrants under the bus, you shouldn’t throw unions under the bus, you shouldn’t throw working families under the bus.

We’re all in this together. And it’s building that community that helps move us forward. It’s going to be what gets us out of this. I truly think so.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Real News Network Podcast. And thank you to our guest, Erin Reed. Erin is a transgender journalist reporting on LGBTQ+ legislation, news and life, and you can follow her work on Substack using the link that we provided in the show notes for this episode. If you want to get more coverage and hear more important conversations just like this, then we need you to become a supporter of the Real News Now. Share this podcast with people in your circles, your friends, family, and coworkers. Sign up for the Real News Newsletter so you never miss a story and go to the realnews.com/donate and become a supporter today. I promise you guys, it really makes a difference. For the Real News Network, this is Maximillian Alvarez signing off from Baltimore. Take care of yourselves and please take care of each other.