They tell us this is about “privacy.” They tell us it’s about safety. They tell us it’s about common sense. And every time, what they really mean is control.

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Kansas Republicans have dusted off the long-discredited bathroom bill and dressed it up in legal language and bureaucratic cruelty. They want to fine people for existing. They want to criminalize the most basic human need. They want to turn teachers, janitors, librarians, and “everyday Kansans” into the gender police, deputized to interrogate strangers in a hallway because a lawmaker in Garden City feels uncomfortable.

Let’s call this what it is: a direct assault on the promise of the Fourteenth Amendment. Equal protection under the law doesn’t come with an asterisk that says unless a state legislature decides your identity is inconvenient. Due process doesn’t mean the government gets to invalidate your birth certificate, reissue your driver’s license, and redefine your existence with the stroke of a pen. The Constitution was written to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority, not to give politicians a roadmap for how to erase them.

The conservatives lost their war on gay marriage. The country moved forward, and history left them behind. So they picked a new target. Transgender Americans became the next culture-war battlefield, the next group to be caricatured, misrepresented, and legislated into a corner. This isn’t about bathrooms. This is about who gets to belong in public life.

I didn’t ask to be trans. I didn’t choose it. I didn’t wake up one morning and decide to become a political talking point. I woke up wanting the same things everyone else wants: to go to work, to run errands, to live my life without being treated like a problem to be solved. And yet here we are, watching lawmakers debate how many times I can use a restroom before I become a criminal.

When a bill defines “gender” as a biological fact frozen at birth, it’s not making a scientific argument. It’s making a moral one: that your life, your identity, your dignity are subject to legislative approval. When it threatens fines and misdemeanors for using the wrong door, it’s not protecting anyone. It’s sending a message about who is welcome and who is not.

We have seen this movie before. History is full of moments when governments decided certain people were different enough to be regulated, monitored, and pushed out of sight. You don’t have to squint very hard to see the parallels.

Trans people are not a hypothetical. We are your neighbors, your coworkers, your kids’ classmates. We pay taxes. We vote. We love. We live here. The Constitution doesn’t belong to one party, one faith, or one definition of normal. It belongs to all of us.

And no bill, no amendment, no committee vote gets to take that away.