The political battle between common sense and nonsense is — sadly — a sign of the times.
Transgender ideology — which defies common sense and physical reality — is being entrenched and encoded in law and government documents. Common sense warriors are fighting the movement in the halls of government, in the classroom and even inside churches.
The heroes in the common sense army are female. After all, women and girls are the main targets of the transgender movement — the nonsense advocates would see them replaced by a grotesque caricature of what it is to be female.
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders is a champion of common sense, and she’s fighting back against the nonsense.
On Tuesday, her administration announced it no longer will allow residents to use “X” instead of male or female on state-issued driver’s licenses or identification cards.
“This action restores DFA’s long-standing policy that license and ID holders must display a gender of ‘male’ or ‘female,’ as indicated on an original or amended birth certificate,” the Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration said in a news release.
The Associated Press complained that the change will “make it more difficult for transgender people to change the sex listed on their licenses and IDs.”
Sanders is a veteran of the gender war. Last year, she signed an executive order banning gender-neutral terms from state documents.
In a statement Tuesday, she said the new policy “is just common sense. Only women give birth, men shouldn’t play women’s sports, and there are only two genders. As long as I’m Governor, Arkansas state government will not endorse nonsense.”
Should more states follow Arkansas’ lead?
According to the AP, the measure “removes the ‘X’ option that had been used by nonbinary and intersex residents” since 2010.
The change will be sent to a legislative committee of the Arkansas General Assembly to be approved, according to Fox News. If it is approved, all previously issued licenses and IDs with the “X” designation will be valid until they expire. Those who identify as “X” residents will update their gender upon renewing their license or ID.
DFA Secretary Jim Hudson said the old “X” policy had not gone through the public comment process and legislative review required by state law.
“This change announced today reflects a commonsense approach that ensures a license or ID issued by the State of Arkansas is based on objective, verifiable information,” Hudson said in a statement. “All of our stakeholders in law enforcement, other government agencies, caregivers, schools, and businesses depend on DFA-issued licenses and IDs to keep our communities safe and to prevent fraud.”
Not everyone is cheering the common sense move.
“This proposed policy seeks to erase the existence of non-binary and intersex Arkansans by denying them identity documents that reflect their true selves, forcing them into categories that do not represent their identities,” the nonsense champion American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas said in a statement.
The battle is far from over. Almost half of all U.S. states and the District of Columbia allow “X” as an option on licenses and IDs, according to Fox News.
Don’t let the numbers fool you. People who identify as other than what they are are a tiny minority of the population.
For example, out of some 2.6 million active Arkansas driver’s licenses, 342 of them have the “X” designation. Out of approximately 503,000 IDs, Arkansas has 174 with the “X” designation.
In 2022, about 1.6 percent of people in the U.S. identified as transgender or nonbinary, according to Pew Research. Changing laws and entire bureaucratic systems to accommodate such a small minority defies common sense.
The Arkansas move is the latest effort by a Republican state to legally define sex as binary — a return to the common sense truth that God made males and females.
Critics claim such a binary definition is discriminatory to those who identify as transgender or nonbinary. The nonsense champions refuse to realize that how one feels does not necessarily correlate with reality, and attempting to change reality for the sake of a feeling is pure folly.
For those who are born with external genitalia or an internal reproductive system that is not considered typical for a male or female person, they are the exception to the rule and should not be the rule itself.
