By Joelle Bayaa-Uzuri Espeut, The Normal Anomaly and Dr. Ray Serrano, League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC)
On National Voter Registration Day, we celebrate a rare holiday from partisanship to honor the power of the people. One Person, One Vote. Right? This is what democracy looks like. But what if your personhood is under attack, including who you are and the documents you need in everyday life?
New threats in states across the country are undermining our chance to make decisions that directly affect our lives.
Every American should be alarmed at what is happening. It should light more fires under the five alarm fire we’re already in, to get out and make sure you’re registered and can use your votes for everyone’s essential freedoms.
In recent weeks, state agencies, led by extremist lawmakers in Missouri, Texas and Florida, have taken steps to sneakily make it that much harder for transgender, nonbinary, and Black and Latine people to be themselves, be seen, and be represented in their own states.
It’s happening in plain sight and under the radar, through state agencies extremists currently control. The Missouri Department of Revenue, which had worked with advocates to offer a form making it easier to change a person’s gender marker, quietly removed the form that has been on the state website for the last eight years. Now the state wants trans people to provide “medical documentation [of] gender reassignment surgery” or a court order, meaning a judge you’ve never met decides your gender.
This is a good time to remind everyone that not every transgender person has reassignment surgery. Gender identity is the internal sense of self. It is not dependent on surgery or anyone else’s approval. Boiling down anyone’s identity to body parts and surgery is inaccurate and inappropriate.
Missouri and other states already strictly require voters to show photo identification to vote. Removing ways to accurately identify yourself is a new unnecessary hurdle.
Then Texas extremists said, hold my ballot. Texas has stopped allowing trans people to update their own birth certificates. Trans Texans have been able to correct their legal gender marker since at least 2009, according to Transgender Education Network of Texas (TENT).
Trans Texans see it for what it is: a calculated move to erase trans identity in Texas and make our very existence illegal.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has also directed chilling raids against advocacy groups like Catholic Charities and League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), including carrying out a raid on the home of 87-year-old Lydia Martinez, falsely claiming “suspicious” voter activity. The only thing sus here is Paxton, whose Texas-sized cruelty has also falsely and baselessly targeted families of transgender children.
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At least 40% of Texans are Latine. Efforts to marginalize and silence minority communities are part of a disturbing nationwide trend. On August 28, 2024, Paxton’s office launched an email tip line for reporting suspected violations and an “election integrity advisory” that claims a “significant growth of the noncitizen population in Texas.”
In Florida, extremist lawmakers have repeatedly failed to pass legislation against transgender people, likely because no one beyond the extremists is interested in any of this: requiring that state identification and licenses reflect sex assigned at birth: failed to pass. A bill prohibiting gender markers from being changed on birth certificates also failed. At least 80 people have had applications denied to correct their own birth certificates, with no recourse offered. Instead, Florida’s agencies moved to restrict transgender identification outside the legislative process. The latest pattern of erasure via state agency included the tourism bureau, which removed LGBTQ people, events and destinations from the state’s website.
The answer to systematic erasure is for equality voters across the country to take steps today to use their voices and votes to say: This will not stand. Every vote and every voter counts.
Register to vote and update your registration here. Check the LGBTQ and equality records of public figures here. Then make a plan to cast your ballot on behalf of our collective freedoms to be ourselves, and live free from discrimination, including in the states spending taxpayer resources to oppress and suppress their own neighbors.
On National Voter Registration Day, we urge you to use your voice to help others continue to have theirs.
Joelle Bayaa-Uzuri Espeut (she/her/hers) currently serves as Program Director for The Normal Anomaly Initiative, Inc, based in Houston, TX. She has worked with NASTAD, Yale, AIDS United, GLAAD, Gilead/Compass Initiative, Transgender Law Center, SUSTAIN, and CDC, and has appeared in Houston Chronicle, Outsmart Magazine and Fox26 Houston’s “Isiah Factor Uncensored”. She currently is a Board member of the Houston LGBTQ Political Caucus and allgoQPOC, and serves on the Yale CIRA community advisory board.
Dr. Ray Serrano currently serves as the National Director of Research and Policy at the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). In this capacity, Dr. Serrano leads a significant expansion of policy-guided research, informing legislation and enhancing LULAC’s dedication to serving the Latino community.
The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), founded in 1929, is the oldest and largest Hispanic/Latino organization in the United States. With over 264,000 members across nearly 500 councils in 208 cities spanning 33 states and U.S. territories, LULAC works to improve the economic, educational, political, housing, health, and civil rights of Latinos through grassroots programs that engage all Latino nationality groups.
Missourians trying to obtain the form to change their identification documents can contact PROMO’s “The ID for Me” which is tracking cases and difficulties arising from the new protocol.