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Letters were sent to impacted drivers this week notifying them their licenses are no longer valid.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

Traffic Report

Detail from "Smitty" by Walter Berndt, distributed by Chicago Tribune July, 19, 1925

It's time to buckle your seat belts, because today's Graphical History Tour destination is July, 1925. Let's hit the road, shall we?

"Right of Might" by Winsor McCay in New York Herald Tribune, ca. July 18, 1925

The automobile had gone from novelty to everyday life in the space of a single generation, wresting  roadway dominance from horses and pedestrians. Once upon a time, if a pedestrian's destination were directly across the street, one crossed then and there. Children played in rural roadways and city streets. Horses, unless they were at full gallop, easily went around them.

Carriages, horsed and horseless, couldn't maneuver quite so easily. With the ubiquity of the automobile came a nationwide push for laws against what was now called "jay walking": crossing the street anywhere other than at a controlled intersection.

"Will It Come to This" by Orville P. Williams in New York American, July 14, 1925

Nor were the new regulations of pedestrian traffic a strictly American feature:

"Ein Zukunftsbild" by Arthur Johnson in Kladderadatsch, Berlin, July 12, 1925

Besides pedestrians, cross-country motorists had to contend with a patchwork of local roadway systems. U.S. numbered highways did not yet exist. Anyone with the time and sufficient buckets of paint could mark "auto trails" on power poles and name them whatever they wanted. Some, like the Lincoln Trail and Dixie Highway, actually crossed country; others were local, like the Three C Highway, which connected Cleveland to Cincinnati. A transcontinental highway might follow an old wagon trail, such as the Oregon Trail route, or a railroad, as the Union Pacific Highway for example.

Upkeep of the auto trails was largely up to the localities they passed through. A trail set up by some entrepreneur hoping to lure travelers to his tourist trap, on the other hand, might turn out to be a deeply rutted dirt road taking you through creeks instead of over them.

"Let's Build These Highways" by Orville P. Williams in New York American, ca. July 30, 1925

In 1925, the Joint Board on Interstate Highways, in cooperation with the American Association of State Highway Officials (founded in 1914), began work on creating a national numbering system for what would become U.S. Highways. Implementation of their project began within two years.

"Another Badly Needed Road" by Winsor McCay, ca. July 21, 1925

The super highways envisioned by Orville Williams on behalf of eager motorists would still be several years in the future. In the meantime, Winsor McCay offered another recommendation of a needed road. (Note the hat impaled on this guy's fender.) 

"Read Them And Weep" by Denis McCarthy, ca. July 12, 1925

Driving the point home, Denis McCarthy drew a cemetery shared by reckless drivers and careless pedestrians.

(When I last posted cartoons by Denis McCarthy, he seemed to have begun working at the Fort Worth Record after leaving the New Orleans Times Picayune; but his work wasn't appearing in either newspaper by the summer of 1925. I find his cartoons in newspapers that also ran the work of Hearst cartoonists, so I surmise he may have joined Hearst's syndicate.)

"Out Where the Worst Begins" by Tom Foley in Minneapolis Star, July 3, 1925

On the more automobile-friendly side, Tom Foley observes that roads do not remain in pristine condition very long, which is especially true in the land of ice and snow. Why Minnetonka Boulevard had more or deeper potholes than, say, Hennepin Avenue or Lake Street I don't know; perhaps it just happened to be the route Foley took to and from work every day.

"First Impressions Are Lasting" by Arthur G. Racey in Montreal Daily Star, July 28, 1925

Old-fashioned cobblestone streets, while picturesque, are not very automobile-friendly. (I doubt that they got along all that well with horses, either.) Say what you will about them, however, they were probably more effective at depressing traffic than stop signs on every block, roundabouts, or those "Your Speed" monitors, which explains why speed bumps are becoming so popular with urban planners these days.

"Sing Ho, for the Wide Open Spaces" by Denis McCarthy, ca. July 19, 1925

If pedestrians were confounded by ordinances telling them how to cross a street, Denis McCarthy spared some sympathy for motorists baffled by restrictions on how and where to park their car.

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I can't leave today's topic without first checking what was going on in the quintessential autophile newspaper cartoon, "Gasoline Alley" 100 years ago today:

"Gasoline Alley" by Frank King in Chicago Tribune, July 26, 1925

Alas, the gang wasn't gathered around their cars that particular Sunday. Instead, Walt Willet was wandering the great wide open spaces with his foundling son, Skeezix, on foot.

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P.S.: Yes, I know that seat belts were not a thing until 1959.

You May Ask Yourself, My God! What Have I Drawn?

At least once a month, this Graphical History Tour dredges up some of my old cartoons at decade intervals, and today we start with September of 1983.

in University of Wisconsin Parkside Ranger, October 13, 1983

This is one of less than a handful of cartoons I drew using gesso and an artist's blade. The technique involves coating the drawing surface with a white plaster called gesso (it is available in other colors), then painting over that with ink. Once that is dry, you cut away at the ink to reveal the gesso beneath. The resulting heavy shadows can be striking.

You don't have to completely cover the gesso with ink; I've seen cartoons and other artwork where the creator drew the scene on top of the gesso, then continued by cutting away some of the ink in order to lessen shading — the result resembling a woodcut.

My cartoon here came in response to a drunk driving crash in which the president of the student government was critically injured. Although I had made no attempt whatsoever to make anyone in the cartoon a caricature of him, my editors worried that some readers would find it in bad taste.

Well, not every cartoon is meant to be funny, and a cartoon of the student mascot crying would have been trite. To their credit, the Ranger editors held the cartoon to include it in a four-page feature section on drunk driving a few weeks later.

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in Gaze Magazine, Minneapolis, 1993

Some cartoons are meant to be totally serious. Other cartoons are meant to be utterly silly.

In 1993, it was hard to avoid Barney the purple dinosaur, whether you had small children in the house or not; there were various cartoons and late-night comedy sketches around riffing on his "I Like You, You Like Me" song and that dopey voice of his. 

Years later, I saw that some other cartoonist had gotten around to drawing pretty much the same idea that I had. Or maybe it was a meme. Or quite possibly both.

Puns are low-hanging fruit in the cartooning biz, and yours would have to be extremely elaborate and exquisite before you'd have any right to claim, "Hey! That's my idea!"

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2003 marked Harley Davidson's centennial celebration in Milwaukee, and the people putting the big 100th anniversary party together thought it would be a great idea to keep everyone guessing what the big-name entertainer they had hired for the big concert at the Marcus Ampitheater.

Rumors flew that they were bringing in Steppenwolf, whose "Born to Be Wild" is a biker anthem, but who had broken up in 1972. Or perhaps the Allman Brothers, or George Thorogood, or Judas Priest. Or maybe even the Rolling Stones!

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, Sept. 5, 2003

So fans of those bands were disappointed and upset when the mystery headliner was revealed to be Elton John.

Make no mistake: everyone recognized that Elton John was and is a star performer. But he doesn't have that biker vibe one generally associates with riding on a Hog.

Front or back seat.

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for Q Syndicate, September, 2013

One of my favorite things to do in a cartoon is to take a cliché and turn it on its head. The occasion for this cartoon was actually how little opposition arose when six counties in New Mexico began granting marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

The counties had responded proactively to an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit on behalf of same-sex couples in the state. The New Mexico State Supreme Court would rule unanimously in favor of marriage equality in December, extending marriage rights into the more hesitant 27 counties.

A year and a half later, the Supreme Court granted those rights to the rest of the nation, and opposition has proven to be nowhere near "fever pitch."

Except in the case of a few county clerks and a couple of ethically challenged Supreme Court Justices.

Q Toon: We Are Driven

Many of us have become inured to the realization that our Internet of Things — from Alexa to our Rings to our phones and refrigerators and microwave ovens — are constantly spying on us. The Mozilla Foundation recently reminded us that one of the worst busy-bodies in most of our lives is parked right in our garage.

In a report headlined "It's Official: Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy," they reveal that whatever you thought your car was up to, it's worse than you think.

We reviewed 25 car brands in our research and we handed out 25 “dings” for how those companies collect and use data and personal information. That’s right: every car brand we looked at collects more personal data than necessary and uses that information for a reason other than to operate your vehicle and manage their relationship with you. For context, 63% of the mental health apps (another product category that stinks at privacy) we reviewed this year received this “ding.” ...

It’s bad enough for the behemoth corporations that own the car brands to have all that personal information in their possession, to use for their own research, marketing, or the ultra-vague “business purposes.” But then, most (84%) of the car brands we researched say they can share your personal data — with service providers, data brokers, and other businesses we know little or nothing about. Worse, nineteen (76%) say they can sell your personal data.

A surprising number (56%) also say they can share your information with the government or law enforcement in response to a “request.” Not a high bar court order, but something as easy as an “informal request.” ...

Nissan earned its second-to-last spot [second to Tesla] for collecting some of the creepiest categories of data we have ever seen. It’s worth reading the review in full, but you should know it includes your “sexual activity.” Not to be out done, Kia also mentions they can collect information about your “sex life” in their privacy policy. Oh, and six car companies say they can collect your “genetic information” or “genetic characteristics.” Yes, reading car privacy policies is a scary endeavor.

Of course, you can always check out your car company's 3,000-page, single-spaced, no margin, 4-point type in light beige font advanced legalese consumer agreement in search of its privacy policies. But keep reading in order to find out what necessary functions you're probably giving up (like maybe, reverse gear) if you don't agree to the whole thing.

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As you can tell from this week's cartoon, I was not one of those schoolboys who spent his time in class sketching cars in his notebook. I could have at least colored some shadows and highlights on these cars, but I decided not to.

In hindsight, however, I think that the guy in the fourth panel ought to have been driving a convertible with the top down.