Q Toon: Democratic Response

Republicans in this election cycle can't run on the economy, what with an unpopular war started by the most unpopular president ever that has sent fuel prices ballooning, furthering inflation sparked by his ill-conceived tariffs. Many of them are therefore running on culture war issues, number one among them trans-bashing.

(Alabama's Tommy Bubbaville has tried to expand the culture war to include airplane pilots who are "furries" in their off hours. I'm not sure where he came up with that one, although he claimed, "You can't make this stuff up." We know it's not something he read somewhere, because he proudly announced that in order to keep from being confused, he doesn't read. Perhaps he vaguely remembers seeing Chewbacca at the controls of one of them flyin' machine contraptions a while back.)

In a perfect world, Democrats would ignore Republican efforts to divert the electorate's attention away from their party's disastrous record. Instead, we live in a world where Republican-slanted media and Elon Musk-funded PACs doggedly try to keep distracting voters toward Republican talking points.

James Talarico, a target of one of Musk's "He's For They/Them Not You/Us" ads, is running to become the first Democratic Senator from Texas since Talarico was four years old. This week Talarico told  Fox Noise, "As a former public school teacher, I care a lot about our student athletes. I care a lot about our students. And so I will oppose trans athletes playing in girls' sports if it risks safety or fairness.”

Talarico's decision to throw trans student athletes to the wolves has disappointed his trans supporters who had been attracted to his earlier sympathy for the trans community.

As a state representative, Talarico voted against GOP restrictions barring trans student-athletes from playing on sports teams that align with their gender identity. He said such proposals amounted to a push for the government to "police people's private parts" and would harm "the least of these," a reference to Jesus' remarks in scripture. And he compared the justifications offered for the bans — that trans athletes had a genetic advantage and excluding them would promote safety — to rationales historically used to bar Black athletes from competing in professional sports.

Ohio gubernatorial candidate Dr. Amy Acton announced that she " doesn't support boys playing in girls' sports," and Representative Marcy Kapture voted for a Republican bill to require schools to notify parents of a student's request to change their gender, pronouns, or preferred name, and to deny federal funding to schools that "teach or advance concepts related to gender identity." 

Rob Sand, the Democratic candidate for governor in Iowa, has also come out against transgender athletes participating in school sports, although he also promises to veto any “stupid culture-war-Trump bill”

Iowa's Republican legislature has no intention of rescinding its 2022 law criminalizing transgender athletes, so it's not an issue likely to face the state's next governor. At a campaign stop in September, Sand echoed Talarico's faith-based stand on transgender rights in general:

“Now, I’ve been clear … the civil rights repeal for transgender people was wrong,” Sand said. “It was wrong. You should not be fired from your job in the state of Iowa for being different. You should not be evicted from your apartment in the state of Iowa for being different.

“This to me is a question of faith. My faith is all about the outcast, it’s all about the people who are pushed aside, who are not favored. And I think that we have to be making Iowa a place where state government is as welcoming as Iowans are.” 

When pressed at the same event to justify his position on transgender athletes, Sand sidestepped the question.

“This is a conversation I’m interested in having,” he said instead. “I’ve met with One Iowa, I’ve talked to a lot of other trans advocates, and I’m listening to them. I’m open-minded about it. I don’t have anything different to say than what I’ve said before. But again, hearing from you is important, and I don’t think that we recognize how important it is that we just talk to each other. Right?

“Everybody is welcome here. Everybody is welcome at this event, everybody should feel welcome in the state of Iowa. I might not offer you full agreement with everything you believe … I’m doing my best to do what I think is the right thing to do, but I also want to make sure that it’s doing the right thing. Which is why I’m interested in listening to people about that, and I’m going to continue to listen to people.”

As Sand moved on to the next questioner, someone in the back of the crowd called out, “Coward!” Sand heard the voice, but apparently misheard the word, thinking it was “louder.”

These are close races, and Democrats can't really afford to turn off the 1% of voters who are trans (even if the percentage of voters who are trans student athletes is much smaller). Many of us in the cisgender 99% realize that when Republicans get tired of demonizing transgender persons, they will come after some other minority — gays, lesbians, bisexuals, Roma, Latinos (oops, sorry, we're already there), Moslems (ibid.), atheists, Quakers, Unitarians, countertenors, low-T southpaws, vegan paraplegics,  type AB– librarians...

And of course, furries.

Golden Dreams Were Shiny Days

 Today's Graphical History Tour rummages through my September cartoons from 1986, 1996, 2006, and 2016. I'll bring up another September at the end of our tour.

1986

in NorthCountry Journal, Poynette Wis., September 1986

My cartoons for the NorthCountry Journal were drawn to accompany the month's editorial by Susie Isaksen, in this case warning that "Lake Charlevoix may be in Michigan, but what happened there could happen in Wisconsin."

Citing an editorial from Northwoods Call by Glen Sheppard describing Charlevoix as an ideal lake for swimming and fishing, with restaurants and "prissy gift shops" nearby, the alarm is raised: "But Charlevoix's shoreline has been scandalously polluted by some of the most god-awful ugly nightmares of the north — condos."

I've moaned here before how much I dislike drawing buildings. They are mostly impersonal and repetitive, and the perspective is unforgiving. That said, there was no choice here but to draw a lot of  late-20th-Century high-rises.

I did, however, like adding a swimming pool on the roof  of the condo in the upper right corner.

1996

in Journal Times, Racine Wis., September 22, 1996

One of the banes of electoral democracy has been the telephone push poll. Push polls have nothing to do with determining how candidates or issues rate with the public. I doubt that the alleged pollster at the other end of the line is recording your responses at all.

No, the caller first determines which candidate or issue you support, and if it's not the candidate or interest group that hired him/her, then moves on to a series of questions like: "Would you still support Your Candidate's Name Here if you knew that he drops little puppies into boiling water?"

I imagine there are still campaigns that employ push polling these days. Someone picking up the phone is unlikely to remember that the caller represents American Eagle Minuteman Opinion Research or whatever long enough to complain to anyone about it. Most people probably just hang up within the first minute.

Which is the same length of a political campaign or issues interest commercial on television; dishonest ads on social media are even cheaper, and get through to the vast majority who do not answer calls on their cell phones from unknown numbers.

2006

for Q Syndicate, September 2006

Twenty years ago, Gays were effectively banned from military service in the U.S. under "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," a worthless compromise from the Clinton administration with the prior complete and total ban.

The reasoning was that openly gay homosexuals were somehow "bad for unit cohesion and morale." Unit cohesion and morale failed utterly to suffer deleterious effects once the Obama administration lifted the ban on LGBTQ+ soldiers. Even the neo-Nazi and gangster recruits got used to it.

Well, except for one Minnesota National Guardsman who got put in charge of the Pentagon nowadays.

I have a note in the margin of this cartoon that I should have drawn the recruiter with an open collar and no tie. I can't think of any later cartoon I drew set in a recruitment office in which I could have corrected this costume error.

2016

for Q Syndicate, September 2016

I was away from drawing board for much of September, 2016, on a family vacation to Italy, so I left my editors a couple of non-political cartoons to release while I was gone. This one could still be run again today, save that now the President of the United States has weighed in against this kid.

We've just been through the 25th anniversary of 9/11. I thought about basing today's Graphical History Tour on my experience of that day, but I've done that before. I've also blogged about 9/10. And 9/13.

I just don't have any fresh new insight on 9/11, and my own experience was not as directly connected as was many others'. I considered, and rejected, posting some 9/12 cartoons by cartoonists who are no longer with us (Pat Oliphant, Stuart Carlson, Steve Benson, and Mike Ritter, for example).

We were chatting with the owner of a local restaurant Thursday night, and she said that it's hard to believe that 9/11 was a quarter century ago. She was in high school back then, to give you some idea of her frame of reference in saying that. I could have pointed out that on 9/11, hardly any of us had heard of Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, K-Pop, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Aaron Rodgers, or Game of Thrones. 

Donald Trump wasn't even host of The Apprentice yet. 

Speaking of that egomaniacal fascist liar, he came up with a fresh new memory this week of having been hauled away from Ground Zero by two brawny firemen (who, no doubt, had tears in their eyes and called him "Sir"). The organizers of this week's commemoration decided not to give him a speaking role in it, and I'd just as soon do likewise here.

I'll let others who have more personal connections to the events of that day share their non-fabricated, non-embellished memories and, perhaps, some cartoons for those of you too young to have caught them the first time around. Counterpoint's Substack yesterday had anniversary cartoons by some of my progressive, Pulitzer-winning colleagues, if you're interested. 

But as for me, I'm sitting this one out.

Q Toon: Trans Exit Hotline

We watch a lot of Ovation TV in our house, to the point where there are some program episodes we can identify within the first five seconds. My better half says he knows which commercials are going to be shown during which commercial break.

A commercial that seems to be replacing the one for buying gold offers a "hotline" to get people out of solar collector contracts, pretty much like those firms offering help getting out of timeshares. I didn't even know dissatisfaction with solar energy was a thing; when I tried googling for news about it, all that came up was a report that quoted only talk radio hosts.

So anyway, that was the inspiration for this week's Q Syndicate cartoon. Donald Commodus Trump made the weird boast in panel #1 during a campaign appearance over the weekend for Lindsey Graham's sister, Darline, in South Carolina. I've quoted him verbatim, except for adding the word transgender from earlier in his diatribe.

You can tell it's the way he talks, because I wouldn't have come up with that "Nobody ever heard about it" sentence myself. It's superfluous and doesn't quite make sense; it's just Trump again boasting his strange belief that his stable genius brain discerns all sorts of things no other human being is capable of ever having conceived before.

Now, I will concede that gender reassignment surgery isn't for everybody, so it is possible that a handful of people who thought it would solve all their problems come to realize that it didn't. It's up to them and their health care professionals to decide whether to pause, halt, or reverse their transition; no responsible physician would consult with the Absolutely Corrupt President of the United States for his Rx.

There is a reason, however, that nobody ever heard about the hospitals kowtowing to Trump's order to perform reverse transgender surgery — which, for the sake of brevity, I will hereinafter call "snart surgery." (Surely nobody has ever heard about it.)

Top snart surgery would be based on traditional breast augmentation/reduction procedures; I imagine that bottom snart surgery isn't absolutely impossible, either. I doubt, however, that it would be 100% effective, and I'm absolutely certain that even if Trump were able to order snart surgery done on you, neither he nor his Republican Congress are ever gonna foot the bill. 

Q Toon: W-hoops

Perhaps if I had followed basketball more closely, I would remember who Royce White and Enes Kantor were; they retired from the NBA a couple years ago. 

Apparently, life outside of the limelight has been lonely for them, because they have decided to enlist in the Republican Culture War against transgender athletes by claiming to be transgender themselves as a ruse to qualify for the WNBA draft. Royce's pretense of being transgender has extended only as far as donning a blonde wig for a podcast; Kantor hasn't even committed to that much.

It can't be for the money. WNBA players, even the league's stars, make considerably less than their NBA counterparts. That's why they end up taking summer jobs overseas at the risk of becoming an international hostage, as happened to Brittney Griner.

White's and Kantor's purported reason for their ploy is that they are protesting that WNBA rules lack a definition of what a woman is and isn't. Never mind that there are no transgender women in the WNBA today, nor has any transgender woman beside these two fakers declared any intention of entering the WNBA draft. 

The sole exception has been Layshia Clarendon, a non-binary/trans woman who played on seven WNBA teams from 2013 to 2024. As I said, I don't follow basketball all that closely, but I think if there were any transgender basketballer coming up through the college system or making international waves in Croatia, I think I would have heard about it.

On the outside chance that White and Kantor are sincere in their concern for the integrity of women's basketball, trans athlete Karleigh Webb has suggested four approaches for the WNBA to "shut down the circus," as she puts it:

1. Ignore the two and refuse to draft them, then tough out the ginned-up outrage from right-wing agitators.
2. Require trans athletes to prove they have been on feminizing hormone replacement therapy for at least one year before becoming eligible to play.
3. Await the findings, expected next year, from the gender eligibility committee of FIBA, the international basketball governing association.
4. "Once the WNBA Finals end, owners, coaches and the players’ union, along with researchers and trans athletes well-versed in these policies, should come together and build an evidence-driven, basketball-specific eligibility policy. The objective shouldn’t be to balance inclusion against fairness, as though one must necessarily come at the expense of the other. The objective should be to align inclusion, competitive integrity, fairness and safety."

The ringleaders of the circus aren't likely to be assuaged by any of these suggestions. They have a vested interest in keeping the circus up and running. 

But you have to start somewhere.

fin

An Army of TestosterOne

Secretary of Butchness Pete Hegseth announced last week that military recruits — men, and any women that he hasn't yet driven out of the service — will now be tested for testosterone levels. Anyone found wanting in the T-level department will be offered the option of undergoing hormone therapy (the sort of thing the Trumpsters claim is so very, very dangerous for transgender persons).

Soldiers can, we are told, refuse the testosterone treatment. The choice is theirs, although future promotions and positive performance reviews may not be. 

Basing a cartoon on a popular internet meme is dicey. There is a good chance that somebody will have already beat the cartoonist to the idea. And probably has beat me to publication.

I considered basing the beefcake in the foreground after movie soldiers who dispense with wearing shirts early on, like Rambo or John Matrix; or the old GI Joe dolls. But since my print clientele is the LGBTQ press, patterning him after the hyperhomosexualized military hunks in Tom of Finland's cartoons seemed the more obvious choice. 

I'm not saying that Mr. Hegseth is part of that closeted gay Republican mafia that Hunter Biden was talking about this week.

Well, I'm not saying he isn't, either.

Q Toon: Can You Take a Joke. Please

A witless baboon in the White House Octagon to celebrate Donald Commodius Trump's Octogenarian Birthday made a gratuitous swipe at former First Lady Michelle Obama, grabbing the mic to call her a man. 

I guess MAGArillas think that kind of thing is funny. At least until they start clinging to it as a core belief, like their tenacious insistence despite all evidence to the contrary that her husband was born in Kenya.

It's of the same joke book of pretending that James Talarico is a transgender vegan, or Al Gore claimed to have invented the internet.

To be fair, liberals do it, too. Sarah Palin never said she could see Russia from her house; J.D. Vance never wrote that he made passionate love to a sofa. And Donald Trump doesn't really have a pig snout. I do not, however, see liberals insisting that these things are, in fact, true.

Poking fun at politicians is fair game; questioning the gender identity of Mr. Talarico and Mrs. Obama, however, is intentionally mean. The present fascist regime is devoted to persecuting transgender and gender-non-conforming persons, so casting aspersions on someone's gender identity can hardly be innocent fun.

Of course, there are dimwitted, cranky trumpeters who imagine that coining the word Dumocrats or calling anyone who disagrees with him stupid is fiendishly clever, and any liberal who doesn't agree must not have a sense of humor.

Q Toon: He's Also (Gasp!) a Serial Perambulator

Democrats keep wishing upon a star that they can flip one of Texas's Senate seats. This year, their star is named James Talarico, a former seminarian currently serving in the state House of Representatives.

Democrats' hopes are up because Republicans tossed incumbent Senator Cornyn in favor of scandal-ridden Texas Attorney General Kenneth Paxton, indicted for fraud, and impeached by the state house but not convicted of abusing the power of his office and accepting bribes. He has been roundly criticized for a plea deal he struck for a politically-connected pedophile to serve only a single day in jail. (He's also a serial adulterer, but nobody besides Mrs. Paxton cares about that kind of thing any more.)

Without anything Republicans can say in favor of Mr. Paxton other than he has the enthusiastic endorsement of likewise ethically lacking Donald Trump, the GOP's talking point is to question Talarico's manhood. They seized on his having ordered a pair of vegetarian breakfast tacos to falsely label him a "soy boy vegan"; they pretend that he's gay, forcing his girlfriend to be more public about their relationship than she wanted to be.

Paxton himself calls his rival "Low-T Talarico," "Tofu Talarico," and "Talafreako." Trump declared his assessment that Talarico “can’t get elected as a vegan in Texas.” Senator Ted Cruz quipped that Talarico risks getting blown away by any stiff breeze. White House Deputy Ghoul of Staff Stephen Miller lied that Talarico is "the first transgender Senate candidate." 

Yeah, these Republican hate-mongers think that kind of thing is funny. Like that roid-rage meathead calling Michelle Obama a man at the White Waffle House Cage Match on Trump's octogenarian birthday party on Sunday.

For the record, she isn't. Not that there's something wrong with that.

I’d post some photos of the current First Lady here, but slutshaming is wrong.

Anyway, it's hard for Talarico to deny being gay, vegan, or transgender without offending gays, vegans, or transes (what the hell is the plural of trans anyway?). His campaign did tweet an “Official Statement from James Talarico on Vegan Accusations” that consisted entirely of a picture of him taking a bite out of a turkey leg at the Texas State Fair.

He has yet to drop his drawers to disprove the transgender slur.

The right-wing echo chamber wouldn't accept that as proof anyway.

Q Toon: Monkey Business

Congressional Republicans have proposed five anti-LGBTQ+ riders to the National Security and Department of State Appropriations Act, a must-pass funding bill for the State Department.

The riders range from restricting Pride flags in federal buildings to banning transgender healthcare; all attack the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans and have nothing whatsoever to do with funding the State Department or national security.

You might be thinking, wait, haven't Absolutely Corrupt Trump Regime™ executive orders already accomplished all of the crap in those riders? Yes, exactly. 

But the point of Congress passing these discriminatory and homophobic provisions into law would be to prevent some future, more enlightened administration from signing an executive order to return things to pre-Trump conditions. It would take another act of Congress to undo this act of Congress.

So I came up with this literal interpretation of the figurative term "riders." Since primatologists have recently discovered that homosexual behaviors are not exclusive to humans and bonobos, I might have tried to depict the Republican riders as some creature more associated with LGBTQ+ophobia instead. 

But having the bicyclist carrying five GOP elephants would have been a difficult draw.

Besides, pachyderms aren't all that straight and narrow, either.

Q Toon: Breaking Bad News to the Boss

The Absolutely Corrupt Trump Regime™ was dealt a setback in its persecution campaign against transgender Americans last week. A federal judge in Oregon rejected in no uncertain terms Health & Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr.'s new policy threatening to block Medicare and Medicaid funding from any hospital that offers gender reassignment therapy to transgender youth who want it.

At least 40 hospital systems across the country had halted gender therapy services after the Department of Health and Human Services issued the "Kennedy Declaration" on December 18, 2025; as a result, even families who had left transgender-hostile red states for transgender-friendly blue ones found that their children were still denied proper care.

“Unserious leaders are unsafe. There is nothing more serious than our leaders’ dedication to the rule of law so that we might maintain the integrity of our constitutional democracy,” [U.S. District Judge Mustafa T.] Kasubhai wrote.

“This case demonstrates how disregard for the rule of law does not merely result in an abstract infraction. Rather, and tragically, this case is one of a long list of examples of how a leader's wanton disregard for the rule of law causes very real harm to very real people.”

Ruling in favor of the 21 states* and the District of Columbia who filed suit against the Kennedy Declaration, Judge Kasubhai found that it exceeded the administration’s authority, violated federal rulemaking requirements, and conflicted with existing law, "effectively banning by fiat an entire category of healthcare."

Judge Kasubhai's 49-page decision rejected as "absurd" the HHS contention that reversing the Kennedy Declaration would deny the Secretary his right to express his views on important public issues. 

"Defendants cannot bully or gaslight this Court into ignoring the many procedural and legal flaws of the Kennedy Declaration by invoking one of the most sacred principles of our constitutional democracy — the freedom of speech — when that principle comes nowhere close to being implicated. Rather, Plaintiffs' claims challenge Kennedy's authority to unilaterally, categorically, and without any process, supersede professional standards of care regarding gender-affirming care that apply in the Plaintiff states."

A higher Court (ahem) might have five or six more charitable opinions of an unserious leader's wanton disregard for the rule of law. But for now, let's enjoy our successes and liberties while we still have them.

_____________

* The 21 states are California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawai'i, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin.

 

Q Toon: Tennessee Tattoo

Legislation continuing Tennessee Republicans' persecution of their transgender minority is working its way through Nashville. Not satisfied with criminalizing transgender care for minors, legally requiring trans men to use women's rest rooms and trans women to shit beside men, forbidding state prisons from allowing gender care medication for trans inmates, et cetera ad nauseam, the state's Republicans now want to require extensive data collection on patients receiving gender-affirming care to the state.

The Tennessee House passed House Bill 754 in March; the Senate passed a version of its companion Bill 676 on Monday, amended to authorize the state Attorney General to investigate non-compliance with the law. 

Supporters of the bill describe the measure as a tool for understanding medical outcomes. Opponents say it is something else entirely. They say it is a mechanism for tracking a vulnerable population. ...

The legislation would require clinics to report detailed information about gender-affirming care to the state, part of a broader effort, lawmakers say, to study treatment trends. But similar proposals in Tennessee have already raised alarms about what happens when “data collection” begins to resemble [patient] identification.

The legislation does not apply to cisgender patients getting estrogen or testosterone treatments, only to transgender patients, making any claims that its intent is to quantify patients who come to regret their transition — a tiny minority within a tiny minority — and to guarantee their right to de-transition —highly suspect. The absolute number of cisgender patients who later regret estrogen or testosterone treatment is probably very similar.

This legislation is not health care. It's intimidation. It’s big government. It’s Big Brother Watching You.

The measure now returns to the Tennessee House for reconciliation with the Senate's amended version. Given the overwhelming Republican majority in both statehouses, passage is all but absolutely certain.

Q Toon: Bryon's Been Busted

Mercurial U.S. President Donald Commodus Trump has put his genocidal threats against Iran on hold for the next twelve days, so we cartoonists can all go back to all the other distractions from the Epstein files that have been piling up in our in-boxes.

By now, even the Trump l'oeilists in their Fox Noisemax echo chamber have heard about Cosplay Kristi Noem's husband, Bryon, getting caught in some cosplay of his own.

I confess that I was unaware of this "bimbofication" fetish scene among heterosexual males, who stuff inflated party balloons under a crop top and swipe their wives' hot pants to chat on line. It must be more popular than I would have expected, given that this is apparently what Republicans and J.K. Rowling think transgender women are all about.

So, while the temptation to make fun of this guy is way too irresistible (I drew the cartoon and you've read this far: QED), there is something to be said against kink-shaming a guy who is not himself a public figure, merely married to a Cabinet official who had a bed installed in her Air Force jet to share with her erstwhile underling Corey Levandowski where Bryon got to read about it all over the internets.

As Washington Post columnist Monica Hesse put it, “When I looked at those photographs, the first word that came to mind ... was 'lonely.' These were seemingly lonely, isolated photographs of a middle-aged man who had not sought a public life — and who now would not be allowed much of a private one. I almost see something vulnerable in those photographs, now exposed to the internet and all of our group chats.”

Sex therapists (and kink pridesters) counsel that kink shaming is wrong. 

Kink shaming is a problem because it prevents people from being able to live an authentic life.

It’s especially problematic that having niche sexual interests could land you on the front of a newspaper, losing your job or unable to retain custody of your children – all of which is totally legal as it ‘brings a company in to disrepute’.  

Or, as two upstanding citizens of the Noems' hometown put it,

“Y’all should be sympathetic, he’s a father,” a surly staff member at a Watertown strip club told The [New York] Post when the topic veered toward the scandal. A bartender at the jiggle-joint chimed in, “We don’t think of them as politicians, we think of them as parents.”

Of course, not everyone agrees, because America has a well-established Puritan culture. An argument can certainly be made, moreover, against the objectification of women and girls, out of which which Mr. Noem's kink very definitely grows.

But in case the next time you hear from Bryon Noem is when he organizes Bimbofied Story Hour at the Hamlin Elementary School Library, please keep one thing in mind. 

Y'all should be sympathetic. He's a father.

Q Toon: Not in Kansas Any More

Overriding their governor's veto, Kansas Republicans passed a law abruptly voiding the drivers' licenses of any and all transgender citizens of the Sunflower State. The Kansas law further invalidates birth certificates in which the gender marker has been changed.

AIRWAY, Kan. (KCTV) - Kansans are now required to list their sex at birth on their driver’s license under a new state law that has already rendered hundreds of IDs invalid.

Letters were sent to impacted drivers this week notifying them their licenses are no longer valid. ...

The law also prohibits transgender people from using public restrooms on government property consistent with their gender identity. It allows someone suspected of being transgender and violating the law to be sued for up to $1,000.

Trans Kansans are required to surrender invalidated driver’s license to the state before they can receive a replacement that misidentifies their present gender (and I wouldn't be surprised if the new license were to deadname them as well).

There was no grace period, taking effect immediately upon passage. Transgender drivers had no time to comply with the law before losing their driving privileges. 

"People who have changed the gender marker are worried about being pulled over on the way to getting their new driver's license. They're stressed. Matthew Neumann is a transgender man in central Kansas. He leads a statewide LGBTQ mutual aid organization. You know, he's got a long beard, a bald head, and now, whenever he applies for a job or gets pulled over by police, his ID is going to out him as transgender, whether he likes it or not."

The new law, besides imposing penalties for driving without one's birth genitalia, effectively disenfranchises transgender voters; state law requires that voters present a state-issued, unexpired, photo ID to cast a ballot. 

Meanwhile, Texas has not gone so far as to revoke transgender citizens' driving licenses, but does prevent trans Texans from updating the gender marker on their driver's license or state ID; nor is there an "X" option for non-binary persons. Trans activists worried that the state's 2024 law would deter people from voting in Tuesday's primary. 

“Trans voters are left vulnerable to being outed, questioned, or turned away, which creates very real barriers to casting a ballot,” [Caleb Armstrong, a transmasculine Texan and co-founder of Local Queer Foundation] wrote in an email. “It is difficult to find accurate information about voting as a trans person, and for many, the fear of navigating the process is enough to keep folks from voting at all. This fear and confusion has a purpose in trying to silence our voices and keep trans people from participating fully in our democracy.”

As it turned out, more voters may have been deterred from voting simply by a change of the rules on where Dallas voters were supposed to go. Polls had to be kept open for two hours past the usual closing time, just to accommodate voters who went to their usual polling place only to be told they had to go somewhere else.

Even then, Rep. Jasmine Crockett’s campaign is considering a lawsuit over the confusion.

All of which is an argument against constantly changing election rules.

Returning to the topic of this week's cartoon, two trans men from Lawrence, Kansas, have filed a lawsuit in Douglas County District Court to challenge the state's new law. The anonymous pair are represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and a Philadelphia-based law firm. A hearing is scheduled tomorrow.

Q Toon: Off Limits

Never satisfied that there happen to be Democratic and Independent voters out there whose right to vote they haven't taken away, Republicans are pushing yet another plot to throw voters off the rolls.

Calling their scheme the "SAVE Act," the bill as passed by the House "requires individuals to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections," according to www.congress.gov. And by "documentary proof," Republicans mean your birth certificate.

The Senate version of the bill requires voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship not only when registering to vote, but also every time they come to cast their vote. Every time.

What could possibly be the problem?

But one in 10 voting-age American citizens, or an estimated 21.3 million people, either don't have a proof-of-citizenship document like a birth certificate, passport or naturalization certificate, or don't have easy access to one, according to a 2023 survey commissioned by voting rights groups. The survey found people of color are more likely not to have a document proving citizenship.

Obtaining these documents takes time and money. Only about 43% of Americans have passports, according to an analysis by the Voting Rights Lab. The bill says voters can show an ID that indicates citizenship, but currently only five states — Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Vermont and Washington — offer IDs that meet that criteria.

One rather significant group that faces disenfranchisement should the SAVE Act pass the Senate is married women who have taken their husband's surname — whose legal name therefore does not match the name on their birth certificate. A smaller group, but one well-represented in my LGBTQ+ readership, are transgender citizens who have changed their name to match their gender identity.

An even smaller group consists of the Vice President of the United States, Mr. James David Vance, né James Donald Bowman.

SAVE's defenders say that all that married women, transgender persons, and J.D. Vance need is to provide certified documentation of their name change. But there again, those documents cost time and money — and for transgender people in "red" states, dealing with a hostile government bureaucracy.

Side note: As my little form of protest, I've been bringing my passport to the village polling place for identification ever since state Republicans passed photo ID voting into law several years ago. Some poll workers have been taken aback by my showing a passport instead of my driver's license like everybody else. 

Passports do nothing to prove that one resides in the polling district (and I suspect that there are a few owners of summer homes and winter get-aways — a more or less Republican demographic — who have used a driver's license to vote in one location and a passport to vote in another, especially to keep those property taxes down and school levies defeated).

The South American vacation from which I've just returned was within three months of my passport expiring, which meant that I had to apply for a new one before we left. That automatically voided my existing passport, but poll workers here in the village would have had no way of knowing it was invalid had I used it as voter ID in elections last fall or this week's spring primary.

(Lest some Trumpster at DOJ launch any voter fraud investigations against me, my village had no elections in November and no primary races on Tuesday.)

Returning to the topic at hand: The SAVE Act also voids independent voter registration drives. It federalizes elections, demanding that states turn over their voter registration records to the Department of Homeland Security. Mailed ballots from military service members that arrive after Election Day won't count; universal mail-in voting will be outlawed. 

If this SAVE Act slips through the Senate to be signed into law by the Felon In Chief, you can bet your bottom dollar that Republicans won't be satisfied for long. They're sure to pass a SUPERSAVER Act requiring voters to come to their polling place DNA samples from all four grandparents, the deed to their house, and an automobile-dealership-sized American flag.

After all, if Barack Obama's birth certificate wasn't good enough for them, why would they accept yours?

Q Toon: None Taken

The Supreme Court heard arguments last week in a pair of cases over transgender student athletes' rights in Idaho and West Virginia. The two states are among several Republican-run states with blanket bans prohibiting transgender youth from participating in school athletics.

That the present Republican majority will rule against the two girls is sadly a foregone conclusion; the only suspense is whether their ruling will be so broad as to prevent transgender students from athletic activities anywhere, or so narrow as to apply only to Idaho and West Virginia.

The primary concern of the majority justices appears to be how the lawyers arguing on behalf of the two athletes want to define what a female is and whether laws prohibiting gender discrimination apply to that definition. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito are predictably hostile to non-cisgender, non-heterosexual plaintiffs, but former girls’ basketball coach Brett Kavanaugh took a moment to offer sympathy to transgender student athletes. That sympathy, however, is countered by his sympathy for hypothetical cisgender student athletes who don't make the team:

“I hate–hate that a kid who wants to play sports might not be able to play sports. I hate that,” Kavanaugh said. “But … it’s kind of a zero-sum game for a lot of teams. And someone who tries out and makes it, who is a transgender girl, will bump from the starting lineup, from playing time, from the team, from the all league, and those things matter to people big time, will bump someone else.”

“We have to recognize on both sides the zero-sum. It’s not like, ‘Oh, just add another person to the team.’ That’s not how sports works. ... Someone else is going to get disadvantaged.”

It’s a shame that there isn’t enough room on a team’s bench for everybody who was promised a seat.

Q Toon: Kennedy-nial of Care

During Donald Joffrey Trump's first term, I drew a cartoon about his transphobic policies that suggested that he was only pursuing them to satisfy his supporters on the religious right. They are hardly a factor in his second term, so I have to conclude that his persecution of the transgender community is central to his psyche.

Somewhere along the line, there's a girl in his past who turned out to have a little something extra downstairs, and the experience haunts him like Freddy Krueger.

Trump has found a kindred spirit in Robert Felcher Kennedy. The erstwhile environmentalist readily forsook advocacy for renewable energy and fuel efficiency in favor of feels-based health care.

Don't like pills and needles? You're in luck. Newly revised Health & Human Services protocols recommend against vaccines in favor of poultices, whale blubber, and burning some parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. 

Suffering from gender dysphoria? You're in luck, too. Kennedy and the Republican establishment have declared that it doesn't exist any more. If you're unhappy looking in the mirror, botox, lip injections, and rhinoplasty are all hunky-dory, but everything below the chin has gotta stay just as God made it.

And they have ways of making you get used to it.

The ban takes the form of two new proposed rules from Medicaid and Medicare. The first prohibits doctors and hospitals from receiving federal Medicaid reimbursement for gender-affirming care provided to transgender patients younger than age 18. Medicaid is the health care program that covers low-income Americans.

The second rule blocks all Medicaid and Medicare funding for any services at hospitals that provide pediatric gender-affirming care. Virtually every hospital in the country takes Medicare, which covers older Americans and the disabled. Because hospitals rely on Medicare, the rule would have a wide-ranging effect.

Supporters and opponents of transgender rights agree that, taken together, the forthcoming hospital rules could make access to pediatric gender-affirming care across the country extremely difficult, if not impossible.

Even non-chemical, non-surgical approaches are verboten. The Trump Food & Drug Administration has sent warning letters to companies that manufacture and sell chest binders, used by transgender men and some nonbinary people to flatten their chests. The FDA charges that the companies failed to register their products as Class I medical devices with the FDA, in violation of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.  “Failure to adequately address this matter may result in regulatory action being initiated by the FDA without further notice. These actions include, but are not limited to, seizure and injunction.”

I don't imagine that the FDA is going to send that same letter to the makers and sellers of girdles and brassieres.

FDA Commissioner Marty Makary claimed that the brands were guilty of “illegal marketing of breast binders for children, for the purposes of treating gender dysphoria.”....

Makary did not cite evidence that any of the brands market their binders to children; Them found no such marketing copy supporting Makary’s claim on the brands’ websites. Conservatives have claimed for years that discussions of gender identity alone are harmful to children, and their rhetoric has escalated over time; during the HHS press conference, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz falsely claimed that trans youth regularly receive vaginoplasties and phalloplasties costing up to $150,000; in fact, the vast majority of gender-affirming surgeries performed on minors are breast reduction procedures offered to cisgender boys.

The House has also passed bills this month making it a crime to provide gender-affirming care to transgender minors and prohibiting Medicaid reimbursement for gender-affirming care for youth. Neither bill has much chance of passing the Senate unless tucked into other must-pass legislation ― such as the next temporary government funding bill.

All of which will be worth remembering every time Republicans try to tell you that they are not the party of big, obtrusive, over-regulating government.

P.S.: Merry Christmas, and Happy Miscellaneous Holidays!