(Joshua Paladino, Headline USA) Before the 2022 midterm elections, transgender activists worry that voter ID laws, which require citizens to show state-issued identification cards to cast ballots, will force them to associate with their birth names and biological sex.
The complaint from far-Left ideologues, though complex in its jargon, comes down to a simple point: people who drastically alter their appearance, change their names and choose new pronouns often face difficulties in proving their legal identity.
Henry Seaton, a female who presents herself as a male, said she faced this discrimination when she tried to vote at a church outside Nashville, Tennessee, in 2016, NBC News reported.
Seaton changed her legal name to Henry, but the government-issued ID still correctly identified her as a “female.” The poll workers felt understandable confusion and asked him to explain the situation.
“I had to out myself as transgender,” said Seaton, a 24-year-old transgender justice advocate at the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee.
People who suffer from gender dysphoria, like Seaton, report experiencing anxiety and trauma when forced to reveal their legal name and sex.
Seaton said revealing himself to be a male “can be brutally dangerous, especially where I was living, which is a conservative suburb.” Of course, Seaton never claimed that anyone actually threatened him.
“It’s not just embarrassing, but it’s terrifying to have to do that — to try to read the room and see, like, are they going to kick me out? It can be really dehumanizing to have your whole identity nitpicked just so that you can cast your ballot and have your voice be heard,” he said.
The Left has decided to put transgender people alongside poor and black people who claim they cannot access voter IDs or do not feel comfortable revealing them.
NBC News aired a segment during which a transgender activist claimed that “Voter ID laws disproportionately impact trans people.”
“Just over 200,000 eligible trans voters in 31 states that both conduct their elections mostly in person and require or request ID at the polls don’t have IDs that reflect their gender identity and the names they go by,” the outlet reported.
