Today, transgender people across Kansas are reporting receiving letters from the Kansas Division of Vehicles stating that they must surrender their driver's licenses and that their current credentials will be considered invalid upon the law's publication in the Kansas Register on Thursday. Should any transgender person be caught driving without a valid license, they could face a class B misdemeanor carrying up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine. Kansas already requires county jails to house inmates according to sex assigned at birth. The letter, obtained by Erin in the Morning, marks one of the most significant erosions of transgender civil rights in the United States to date.

The letter, which has been reported to Erin In The Morning by a Kansas-based activist, states that under House Substitute for Senate Bill 244, Kansas-issued driver's licenses and identification cards must now reflect the credential holder's “sex at birth.” It warns that upon the law's publication in the Kansas Register on Thursday, February 26, current credentials for affected individuals "will no longer be valid." The Legislature, the letter notes, "did not include a grace period for updating credentials," and anyone operating a vehicle without a valid credential "may be subject to additional penalties." Those whose gender marker does not match their sex assigned at birth are directed to surrender their current credential to the Division of Vehicles for reissuance.

You can see the full letter here:

SB 244, also known as the "bathroom bounty" bill, contained heavy identification document bans as well. The bill was rushed through the Kansas Legislature in January using a "gut and go" procedure that bypassed nearly all public input on its key provisions. Governor Laura Kelly vetoed the bill on February 13, calling it "poorly drafted," but the Legislature overrode her veto days later. In addition to the driver's license provisions, the law bans transgender people from using bathrooms matching their gender identity in public buildings and creates a bathroom bounty hunter system allowing citizens to sue transgender people they encounter in restrooms for at least $1,000 in damages, including potentially in private restrooms. The bill takes effect immediately upon publication in the Kansas Register rather than the standard July 1 effective date—giving transgender Kansans just days between the override and the invalidation of their identity documents.

The consequences for noncompliance could escalate quickly. Under Kansas law, driving without a valid license is a class B misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine—though first-time offenders are more likely to face a citation and fine. A conviction, however, triggers an automatic 90-day license suspension. If a person drives during that suspension, they face a charge of driving on a suspended license, which carries a mandatory minimum of five days in jail. Kansas already requires county jails to house inmates by sex assigned at birth.

The Kansas letters arrive amid an accelerating nationwide campaign to strip transgender people of accurate identification documents. The Trump administration has barred transgender Americans from obtaining passports that reflect their gender identity, a policy the Supreme Court allowed to take effect in November. The Social Security Administration has similarly stopped permitting gender marker updates. At the state level, Florida, Texas, Indiana, and other states have moved to block gender marker changes on driver's licenses or birth certificates. But Kansas appears to be the first state to go further than simply blocking future changes—it is actively invalidating previously issued documents and demanding their surrender.

As a result of this extreme anti-transgender law, the state of Kansas has seen its status deteriorate to a "Do Not Travel" warning in the EITM Trans Risk Map. Transgender people should exercise extreme caution when traveling through the state, and those already living there should take immediate steps to legally protect themselves in the face of laws that could strip their driving privileges, expose them to criminal penalties, and subject them to thousand-dollar bounties simply for using a restroom. For most transgender people who do not already live in Kansas, the risk is now too great to travel there at all.

Ads featuring transgender people have dominated political airwaves in recent election cycles, with more than $200 million spent targeting them in 2024 alone. These ads almost always traffic in hate rhetoric aimed at transgender citizens, while Democrats—charged with defending their rights—too often stay silent, hesitant to speak with conviction. Making matters worse, “centrist” political consultants continue to urge Democrats to drop transgender people altogether. Almost never does a Democrat release a campaign ad affirming support for transgender people. That changed this weekend, when Zohran Mamdani, a New York City mayoral candidate, released a two-minute advertisement steeped in transgender history and direct commitments to the community.

The ad, set to transgender artist SOPHIE’s “It’s OK to Cry,” opens with the story of Sylvia Rivera, a trailblazing activist who helped lead the Stonewall uprising and lay the foundation for the first Pride. It then traces landmarks of New York’s queer history, weaving in Rivera’s friendship with Marsha P. Johnson, before pivoting to the present: a direct condemnation of Donald Trump’s escalating attacks on transgender Americans. Mamdani closes the ad with concrete pledges—to declare New York City an LGBTQIA+ sanctuary, to allocate millions toward restoring transgender healthcare defunded under federal pressure, and to deploy “hundreds of lawyers” to combat the administration’s anti-LGBTQ+ agenda.

You can see the ad here:

The ad serves as a masterclass for Democrats on how to talk about transgender people with empathy and conviction. Many of Mamdani’s own supporters may not know the history he highlights, and so it serves the purpose to educate his supporters in how to humanely talk about transgender people. Through this framing, he grounds his stance in moral clarity rather than political expedience—a rare trait in modern campaigns. For voters on the fence, the ad demonstrates that his support for transgender rights isn’t a focus-grouped calculation; it’s a reflection of his core values. In doing so, Mamdani not only strengthens trust among progressives but also draws in those who may have felt ambivalent, offering them something increasingly scarce in politics today: authenticity.

Mamdani’s ad stands in stark contrast to a growing trend among Democratic leaders who have pushed transgender people to the margins—or abandoned them outright. California Governor Gavin Newsom, despite leading one of the nation’s most progressive states, has spent recent months courting conservative media figures while floating bans on gender-affirming care for people under 25 and vetoing bills meant to protect trans residents. In Massachusetts, Rep. Seth Moulton echoed right-wing talking points, claiming he feared his daughter might be “run over on a playing field” by a trans girl—then defended his rhetoric as a strategic attempt to win elections. Even our first transgender Representative McBride, who has herself leaned into such arguments and has been heavily criticized by transgender community members, called for politicians to not get too far ahead of public opinion on trans issues. These politicians have framed their approach as pragmatic politics. Mamdani’s, by contrast, is rooted in something none of them have shown: conviction, courage, and a willingness to lead rather than triangulate.

This ad isn’t a one-off gesture—it’s consistent with how Mamdani has led. Earlier this year, long before his rise in the polls, he stood on the front lines of protests against NYU Langone after the hospital dropped transgender patients under pressure from Trump administration directives. While many Democrats have condemned attacks on trans healthcare, few have dared to call out the deeper problem: the moral collapse that comes with capitulation. Mamdani did so openly, at a time when there was no political upside. That choice, made before his campaign gained momentum, underscores what the ad now makes undeniable—his convictions aren’t performative; they’re the core of who he is as a leader.

Now, as Mamdani’s campaign stands on the verge of making him one of the most recognizable Democratic leaders in the country, he’s proving that he isn’t abandoning the vulnerable communities who helped elevate him—he’s centering them. Where others see transgender people as a political liability, he treats their inclusion as a measure of moral clarity. It’s a posture that has resonated beyond New York. In Kentucky, Governor Andy Beshear—a Democrat who won reelection in a state Trump carried by 30 points—offered a similar reflection on how authenticity and conviction win trust. “Earning trust and showing people you care about them also requires that we talk to people like normal human beings,” he said. “I vetoed anti-LGBTQ legislation last year because I believe all children are children of God. And whether people agree with my decision, they know why I’m making it.”

Clearly, this political principle of leading with your values is one that the Mamdani campaign has taken to heart. At a time when too many Democratic consultants are urging candidates to mimic Republican talking points, especially on transgender rights, Mamdani is showing the opposite path: one rooted in conviction, not calculation. It’s a lesson his party—and even supposed progressives abroad—have forgotten in their scramble to appease an ascendant right. Their capitulation hasn’t stopped the backlash; it’s only legitimized it. By contrast, Mamdani’s unapologetic embrace of marginalized communities shows what real leadership looks like: a politics that doesn’t ask whom to abandon to win, but whom to lift up to build something worth winning for.

Forming the backbone of North America, the Rocky Mountains have long stood as an emblem of wilderness, with Glacier National Park in Montana dubbed the “Crown of the Continent.” Yet north of the border lies an even more spectacular expanse, protected within four contiguous Canadian Rocky Mountain parks. Glacier delivers vertical drama, not because its peaks are higher, but because the Going-to-the-Sun Road grants visitors direct access to towering walls and deep valleys. Its namesake glaciers, however, are nearly gone—reduced to remnants of what once numbered more than a hundred. Of the Canadian parks, Banff National Park is the most famous and visited, thanks to its early establishment, extensive infrastructure, and postcard landmarks like Lake Louise, Moraine Lake, and Peyto Lake. Banff still retains significant icefields, but Jasper National Park surpasses them by far. Anchored by the Columbia Icefield, Jasper reminds visitors that this is still, quite literally, an Ice Age landscape. The largest of the Canadian Rocky Mountain parks, Jasper feels less developed and less visited, its sheer scale offering a different register of awe.

My encounters with Jasper National Park are split across time. In the early 1990s, I traveled there in winter multiple times to climb frozen waterfalls along the Icefields Parkway. As I retuned in the summer of 2005, my main tools were no longer ice axes, but rather a pair of cameras, with an early full-frame digital camera complementing my trusty 5×7 inch view camera. I set out to make the same kind of landscape photographs I had created in the U.S. national parks. It had been suggested that Canadian parks could serve as a natural extension of the Treasured Lands project, and Jasper’s immensity and diverse scenery certainly fit that mold. Lakes, dramatic peaks, glaciers, icebergs, waterfalls were places made for large-scale landscape photography. But one set of photos from the Athabasca Glacier stood apart: people scattered over ice, human scale incongruously set against geological scale. At the time I didn’t think of them as more than curiosities. Only later did I realize they pointed toward a different way of seeing national parks: one less about pure scenic wonder and more about how we represent, stage, and experience nature.

In the late 2000s, my exposure to William Cronon’s critique in The Trouble with Wilderness forced me to question foundational assumptions: that wilderness is a separate, pristine domain; that nature’s truest form is remote; that human presence is inevitably tainting. His work pushed me toward valuing wonder in places close to my home, to recognizing human histories in landscapes, and to respecting ecological realities rather than idealized myth. Still, there was more missing: how nature is made visible. It’s not enough to say that wilderness is a myth. We need to see how that myth is reinforced. That gap is what J. Keri Cronin’s Manufacturing National Park Nature (2011) helps fill. The book uses Jasper National Park as its primary case, providing specific archival illustrations, but its arguments resonate broadly. Cronin demonstrates that “national park nature” is not something passively encountered but actively produced. By this term, she means a system of visual organization—ways of seeing shaped by photography, tourism promotion, and cultural values—that determines what counts as “nature” in the parks. Within this system, certain images are elevated to canonical status: sweeping vistas emptied of people, charismatic wildlife portrayed as emblems of wilderness, recreational activities framed as solitary communion. At the same time, other realities are suppressed: roads, lodges, signage, human–animal conflict, Indigenous presence, and the infrastructures that make visitation possible. What emerges is not simply nature as it exists on the ground but a carefully curated construct—an aesthetic and cultural product manufactured through photographs, brochures, and promotional imagery that both reflect and prescribe how parks are understood. Wilderness, recreation, and wildlife are not timeless truths but constructs within “national park nature,” each an axis along which representation is organized. Seen this way, national parks are not only ecological spaces but aesthetic ones. Their look—the way vistas are framed, wildlife depicted, and recreation staged—is already curated, more like an exhibition than untouched wilderness.

The book has affected my work profoundly. The photographs I made of the Athabasca Glacier now feel less like odd departures and more like early signals. Cronin shows how promotional images of the Columbia Icefield routinely emphasize its scale and purity while leaving out the very infrastructures that make it accessible. My own pictures inverted that convention: not only did they show crowds scattered across the ice, but also the distant lines of ice-coaches and parking lots, dwarfed by the glacier yet unmistakably present, and even the Canadian flag framing the scene. Together these elements expose what Cronin calls the gap between what is pictured and what is concealed. If official imagery manufactures a vision of pristine wilderness, my photographs insist on the lived reality—a landscape where national symbolism, mass tourism, and the spectacle of ice are inseparable. They still rely on the scenic tradition, depending on scale, light, and spectacle, but they also critique it by insisting on what official imagery leaves out. The tension between continuity and critique has become central to how I now think about photographing parks. My subsequent major long-term project America’s Best Idea, which I began in the same year that Cronin’s book was published, 2011, and is still in progress, owes much to her work—not because of the specifics of what gets included or excluded in images, but because she made clear that national parks are mediated spaces. Her analysis provided the conceptual tools to recognize that parks are never experienced directly or purely, but always through layers of representation, infrastructure, and cultural framing. The park infrastructure— visitor centers, signs, roads, amphitheaters—in America’s Best Idea is no longer treated as distraction to be minimized but as a central feature, making visible the apparatus by which “nature” is mediated.

National parks are more than geography; they are cultural objects, aesthetic modes, and institutions with histories. Photography has always been central to that construction—not a neutral mirror, but a force that shapes what we believe these places are. As Cronin shows, camera images are especially powerful because they appear objective. In Jasper, illustrated guidebooks, postcards, and tourist snapshots created a specific way of seeing the Canadian Rockies: vast, untouched, and pristine. Pictorial conventions taught visitors to frame out other tourists and to privilege empty peaks over parking lots. Once developed, put into albums, and circulated among friends, these images further solidified the myth. What is left out—the crowds, the infrastructure, Indigenous histories, the management of wildlife—matters as much as what is shown, because these absences shape expectations, policy, and public imagination. To photograph parks is therefore to take part in their ongoing manufacture, a responsibility that calls for awareness of visual conventions and a willingness to reveal the complexity that lies behind them. Authenticity may not rest in the absence of human presence but in acknowledging the entanglements—natural, cultural, and constructed—that truly define “national park nature.” Seen in the larger history of photography, Cronin’s book makes clear that to photograph parks today is to take part not only in conserving their images but also in questioning how those images are made.

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing—committed by a suspect who notably was not transgender—conservative leaders have seized the moment to escalate their war on LGBTQ+ people. Vice President JD Vance and Stephen Miller used the death to demand the dismantling of NGOs critical of Kirk. Far-right influencer Matt Walsh openly called for executions of those he branded “LGBTQ+ terrorists.” And now, two sitting members of Congress have crossed a new threshold, explicitly calling for the institutionalization of transgender people—an escalation even by today’s standards.

First, South Carolina representative Nancy Mace, who has a history of vehement opposition to transgender people in congress, called for the institutionalization of transgender people in a street interview where she hurled slurs at the community. She first stated of the shooter’s partner, “It was a transgender… It was a tranny.” When she was asked how she would feel if she were called names the way she calls transgender people, she said “these people are violently ill and should be in a straight jacket with a hard steel lock on it.”

Then, on Newsmax, Representative Ronny Jackson, former White House Physician and Texas Congressman, was asked if “bringing back mental institutions could be on the table.” He responded by saying that transgender people have “legitimate psychiatric issues… we have to do something about this, we have to treat these people, we have to get them off the streets and we have to get them off the internet and we can’t let them communicate with one another. I’m all about free speech, but this is a virus. This is a cancer that is spreading across this country.” He also stated in another portion of the interview that transgender people are “a group of domestic terrorists” that “have been bred by the progressives and the liberal media.”

The rhetoric among far-right influencers and financiers has only intensified since the killing of Charlie Kirk. Elon Musk amplified a post to 21 million people on his platform calling for transgender women to be institutionalized “for a long time, some of them indefinitely,” adding himself that “the truth is so awful that they murder to keep the lie” of their gender identity. Laura Loomer urged that the transgender rights movement be declared a “terrorist movement.” Matt Walsh labeled the killing “left-wing LGBT terrorism” and went further, demanding that “the terrorists and their helpers and funders” be “arrested, prosecuted, and put to death.”

These calls don’t emerge in a vacuum. Institutionalization was once a favored tool for erasing transgender people from public life, a way to disappear them rather than recognize their humanity. For sitting members of Congress to revive that rhetoric marks a dangerous escalation. The parallel is just as clear abroad: in Russia, LGBTQ+ movements have been designated “extremist” to justify bans on supportive NGOs and erase entire communities. That is the same playbook Vice President JD Vance and President Trump appeared to nod toward this week—Vance on the Charlie Kirk Show, Trump in a press conference—when they floated targeting NGOs under RICO charges for political dissent.

There is no evidence that transgender people are “violent” or “terroristic.” The data is unambiguous: the vast majority of killings in the United States are carried out by cisgender men. Even in the case of Charlie Kirk’s death, a cisgender white pulled the trigger. Yet in the rush to manufacture a narrative, the far right seized on the fact that his roommate and romantic partner was reportedly transitioning—ignoring that she refused to destroy evidence and instead turned text messages over to police. That detail doesn’t fit the story they want to tell. Instead, they continue to pin every act of violence they can on transgender people, exploiting a tragedy to escalate their campaign of fear and extremism.

The contents of "trixie" are now with the Debian Images team, who are building and testing all the .iso files you'll be able to download once the release is ready. #debian #debian13 #trixie #ReleasingDebianTrixie