The Ron DeSantis arbitrary cruelty tour continues

Remember when DeSantis rebranded his anti-anti-COVID stance as the “Free State of Florida?” This is the American equivalent of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik:

Florida transgender residents are no longer allowed to change the gender on their driver’s license or ID card under the state Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles’ new policy.

In a memo released last week, the DHSMV directed county tax collectors not to issue replacement IDs or driver’s licenses for residents seeking to change the gender listed on their card. Current law requires that card applicants identify themselves by the gender of their sex at birth.

“The Department can issue a replacement license only when a license or permit is lost or stolen, or when there is a subsequent change in the licensee’s name, address, or restrictions,” the memo said.

The move comes after the state’s GOP-led Legislature approved a law that banned gender-affirming treatments for children and brought new restrictions for adults, including prohibiting Medicaid to be used for gender-affirming care.

The American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association support gender-affirming care for adults and adolescents. But medical experts said gender-affirming care for children rarely, if ever, includes surgery. Instead, doctors are more likely to recommend counseling, social transitioning and hormone replacement therapy.

In recent years, Gov. Ron DeSantis has signed into law legislation that has received wide backlash from LGBTQ+ advocates, including making it a criminal offense for someone to use certain bathrooms that don’t align with their sex at birth and requesting data on from Florida universities on the number of people diagnosed with gender dysphoria or who have received treatment in campus clinics.

Brandon Wolf, a spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign, wrote that the changes made by DHSMV would leave transgender residents vulnerable to unnecessary scrutiny.

“Those policies would forcibly out transgender people anywhere they use a driver’s license or identification document, including when checking in at a hotel, meeting friends at a bar, renting a car, or boarding a plane, among many other instances,” Wolf wrote in a statement.

The fact that this discriminatory measure will beget more discriminatory conduct is what Ron DeSantis would call a “win-win.”

I’ve seen more than one microblog to the effect of “Ron DeSantis brutalized trans people, the state’s public university system, etc. to try to be president and ran the worst campaign in history.” I think this is too charitable, and it shows now that he’s not stopping. He’s a hateful crackpot who does this stuff because he believes it — that it might have at one point potentially helped his hapless presidential campaign was just incidental.