Thanks for this, the article was well worth the read

At the risk of being dogpiled, I’d like to try to have some discussion on this.

Up front, I want to say that Ohio does a lot of dumb shit, trans rights are human rights, and weaponizing random laws against queer people is bullshit.

It seems clear to me that:

• There is a reasonable motivation for requiring reporting of recent name changes, and the exception for marriage is due to this being extremely common. The article states that this usually came up in the past when people wanted to run with a nickname rather than their given name.
• Not stating this requirement on the form is stupid and bad.
• This is compounded by the lack of a box for a former name, practically guaranteeing that this information is omitted.
• All of this is a problem that should be fixed. The Republic governor has acknowledged this, according to a quote from the article.

What isn’t clear to me is that this is selectively enforced against trans people. We only know about the cases where it has happened to trans people because those are the cases that are being reported on. It is not surprising that a cis person encountering a bureaucratic annoyance because they put the name they go by rather than their birth name on the form was not considered newsworthy.

The vibe I get from this is that this is ragebait where the headline invites the reader to jump to conclusions while the contents of the article suggest that this is actually just a stupid case of the government being bad at making a form (something I have personally encountered a lot).

I’m totally fine with being proven wrong, it wouldn’t be surprising in the slightest if there is malicious intent here. Is there evidence of selective enforcement here?

Believe me, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case, and I 100% think this is wrong.

My take here is that filling out a government form and having it be rejected because you didn’t put required information that isn’t stated as required into a box that the form doesn’t have and getting denied/made to redo it is an extremely plausible scenario. In the case of a cis person being denied this way, it’s a mundane bit of bureaucratic nonsense that nobody would blink an eye at.

The article states:

The law has been in place in some form for decades, though it’s rarely been used and usually arises in the context of candidates wishing to use a nickname.

The fact that this law has been identified as a real problem for trans people and that there is a quote in the article from the (Republican) governor saying “this is bad, we should fix it” strikes me as acknowledgement that this dumb rule is disproportionately affecting trans people and should be fixed.

We have a depressing number of real examples of malicious use of the law against trans people, so all I’m saying is that this one doesn’t seem worth getting fired up about unless there is evidence of actual malicious intent here.

I’m going with Hanlon’s Razor on this one and assuming this is just a really stupid bureaucratic failure where a form doesn’t have a box for required info that it doesn’t tell you is required. Curious if there are similar examples for name changes by cis people, which I wouldn’t expect to be newsworthy. Regardless it needs to be fixed.

Before you can even entertain the arguments in this article, don’t you first need to address the barrier to entry of installing an operating system in the first place? This isn’t even a hurdle specific to Linux, I don’t really think the average user has the technical know-how to install any operating system onto a computer.

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