HB 1361 was introduced in the Indiana legislature on Thursday. Its intent was to block transgender Indianans from updating their birth certificates.

The intent of this bill is to strip transgender people of the most basic and fundamental dignity.

HB 1361 seeks to deny the very existence of transgender people—with the cruel mandate that a transgender person’s birth certificate can never match the identity they live as and the person they have always known themselves to be.

--Freedom Indiana

But the bill encountered what appears on the surface to be a sane republican.

Yesterday Samer asked, Does Ted Cruz recognize transgender as an identity?.

Samer was concerned about a statement Cruz made:

The Education Department is suing a school to force them to let a teenage boy shower with teenage girls.

It appears to me that Sen. Cruz believes that transgender people are, effectively, confused people in drag or people with a mental illness.

I left a comment:

Of course he doesn’t. None of the religious right does. That’s why they want to legislate us out of existence.

In writing that I violated one of my own guiding principles: avoid speaking or thinking in universals. In reality, I know that there definitely are people from the religious right who are themselves transgender.

Kyle Knight and Neela Goshal have written an interesting essay on the rights...or lack of same...of transgender people around the world.

The process is as universal as it gets: when a baby is born, a doctor, parent, or birth attendant announces the arrival of a “girl” or “boy.” That split-second assignment dictates multiple aspects of our lives. It is also something that most of us never question.

But some people’s gender evolves differently, and might not fit rigid traditional notions of female or male.

That should have no bearing on whether someone can enjoy fundamental rights. But for transgender people it does—to a humiliating, violent, and sometimes lethal degree.