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Comment on Trans people in Kansas are being ordered to surrender their drivers licenses

If they try this shit in my state, I’d fucking sue.

I had surgery BECAUSE it would let me change my drivers license. I paid $5500 as a broke college student because I was getting turned down for jobs with that stupid “F.”

I don’t understand how any of this is legal. The constitution prohibits “ex post facto” laws - how can you revoke someone’s documentation when they complied with the laws as they were at the time?

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CocaineShrimp@sh.itjust.works ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

I don’t understand how any of this is legal

That’s the thing - It’s not. They don’t give a shit, and the judicial system isn’t doing anything about it

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- CainTheLongshot@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  And even if they did, it would take months, if not years, to resolve. Until then people will either be disenfranchised and can’t vote or forced to update their ID’s, which could also take months of paperwork to resolve.
  
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daychilde@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

how any of this is legal. The constitution

The problem is that you respect and believe in words. The people currently in charge could give two fucks. Ultimately, words only have the power that we give them, so when those in charge ignore the Constitution, then the Contitution has no power.

I have severe ADHD. It’s funny in a way because when I was younger, I tried to understand the rules of my employers and follow them. And yet I still lost jobs. In part because of issues related to ADHD specifically, but in part because what companies SAY the rules are is not what the rules are. If you’ve worked in a corporate environment, you know that there’s go-to people for things. And while there’s official processes (or maybe even not), what ACTUALLY happens is that someone goes to the person who can do something and asks them to do it, and generally they do, and that’s like 75% of how business actually runs.

In the same way, there are rules and decorum and traditions in politics and revolve around the Constution and various bodies of legislature, et cetera. And so there’s nothing that ACTUALLY forces anyone to follow any of that except voluntary compliance or physical threat because policing bodies enforce things.

This is why the rich are free, largely, from most crimes. They aren’t enforced. And this is how our democracy crumbled. The Constitution hasn’t been repealed. It doesn’t have to be. It is simply ignored. Worse, those who claim to follow it shit on it and ignore it and throw it out.

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- jaennaet@sopuli.xyz ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  
  or physical threat because policing bodies enforce things.
  
  And unfortunately those kinds of organisations are full of people who tend to lean very heavily towards authoritarianism, so once the winds shift enough you’ll suddenly find that the people who are supposed to be enforcing the law, well, don’t.
  
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  - daychilde@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    As we have seen in recent months. heh :/
    
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Witchfire@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I’m currently outside the US but I need to renew my passport, which has had the correct gender marker and name for 10 years. Naturally they’re being butts about it, I’m pulling my hair doing this. The Nazi bastards don’t care

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balsoft@lemmy.ml ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

The constitution prohibits “ex post facto” laws - how can you revoke someone’s documentation when they complied with the laws as they were at the time?

I agree with you generally that this should be illegal, but it probably isn’t.

It definitely isn’t ex post facto; this is not a law that punishes anyone from a legal perspective, it merely changes the requirements for a certain privilege (the ability to drive a vehicle). If it declared these licenses invalid before the date of the law (which could carry punishments for illegally operating vehicles), then it would be ex post facto.

Another way to put it is that it simply makes a certain action illegal which was previously legal, and laws do that sort of thing all the time. Consider that in the US you didn’t need a driver’s license in order to drive at all until 1913. That NJ law also “revoked” someone’s privilege even though they complied with the laws previously, requiring them to get a permit that they didn’t need before. But, since it didn’t introduce any punishments for not having the permit before it was introduced, it wasn’t ex post facto.

Of course the law is also clearly discriminatory, but US’s extremely limited anti-discrimination laws are likely not broad enough to be applied here.

The current events should awaken many people to the sad fact that US laws and its entire legal system exists primarily to protect the wealthy and the powerful from everyone else; all other functions are secondary. As such, many horrible, immoral, and unjust things will be legal under US laws, and many others will be twisted into being legal by the supreme court.

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- disorderly@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  It’s true that this isn’t ex post facto, but in a sane interpretation of the law it would be discrimination against a protected class; a woman who was assigned female at birth grts preferential treatment under the law with respect to a woman who was not.
  
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  - WoodScientist@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Unfortunately we live in an age of madness.
    
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