By Thea Hillman and Jon Cohen
Keshet.com
A new law passed in Kansas is bad for transgender people, bad for the Jews, bad for all of us.
Effective Thursday, February 26, the Kansas state government passed a law that invalidated the drivers licenses of transgender people in the state overnight and ordered them to surrender their IDs. This law is harmful and unconstitutional; the ACLU filed a lawsuit in Kansas state court, working to overturn it, or at least buy time for transgender residents. As two Jewish queer people who work to advance LGBTQ+ equality, this news was chilling.
Jewish history warns us about the dangerous slippery slope of rapidly changing identification document laws: On October 5, 1938, the Nazi Ministry invalidated all German passports held by Jews and demanded they be surrendered to the government.
It’s crucial to understand the connections between what’s happening in Kansas and in our country—and what could happen next. As Rabbi Daniel Bogard said, “Not every 1935 becomes a 1942, but every 1942 was preceded by a 1935.”
When your ID documents are valid when you go to sleep, but when you wake up, you can’t take your kid to school or yourself to work, we’re all in trouble. When thousands of people can no longer vote in their home state, or any state, everyone is at risk of losing our freedoms.
The actions of the Kansas state government and the continuing attacks on transgender, nonbinary, and intersex people are frighteningly reminiscent for Jews of our long history of persecution, which has also included confiscation of identity documents, scapegoating, book bans and destruction of information access. We have all seen this before.
Invalidating identification documents is a drastic escalation. Whether you are transgender or not, whether you are in Kansas or not, this affects all of us. Our Jewish tradition compels us to act in the face of injustice; our history shows us what happens when we don’t. What happens in one state, rarely stays there. What happens in one community, rarely stays there. Each violation of our rights is a test, and how we respond lets them know whether or not a tactic will succeed at scale, in other communities, across the country.
As Jewish “friends of Dorothy,” please take it from us: we’re ALL in Kansas now.
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Preceding was distributed by Keshet, the Jewish LGBTQ+ organization.