It starts with a piece of plastic. In Kansas, trans and nonbinary people are being ordered by the state to surrender driver’s licenses that reflect who they are — or have their licenses revoked entirely. This isn’t an abstract policy debate. It is the slow, systematic removal of the ability to participate in daily life.

Without an ID that matches who you are, the ordinary becomes impossible. Picking up medication requires ID. Driving there requires a license. Cashing a paycheck to pay for it requires verification. Every transaction becomes a confrontation, every door a potential threat. The state doesn’t have to lock you up to confine you; it simply has to make sure you can’t participate in it.

This same logic of erasure is playing out here in Texas. On March 18, SB 12 — a law designed to persecute drag performers — is set to take effect. Its vague, sweeping language is meant to chill, to intimidate, to make performers think twice and venues back away. It is the same goal: to make public existence feel so precarious that people retreat.

Not long ago, Texas passed HB 299, the state’s so-called “sex definition” law. By rigidly defining “man” and “woman” based on reproductive organs at birth, it tells intersex Texans they may not legally exist. For them, this isn’t abstract. It means a driver’s license that doesn’t match who they are. It also normalizes the very surgeries forced on intersex children to make their bodies “fit”— procedures chosen for them before they could consent. All in the name of bigotry masked as “biological accuracy.”

For those of us working in reproductive justice, none of this is distant. Bodily autonomy has always meant more than the right to end or continue a pregnancy. It is the right to move freely — to cross a county line, a state line, a border — without that movement being deemed illegal. Yet pregnant young people, classified by the government as unaccompanied minors, are transported thousands of miles to Texas, where abortion is banned, maternal mortality rates soar, and the complex care these young girls need — some as young as thirteen — is not available. ICE moves human beings across the country, not for their benefit, but to cage them.

Then, the United States drops bombs on Iran, allegedly to end an oppressive regime —as if Queer, Trans, and Intersex people do not live under our own within this country’s borders.

Here is the throughline: The state decides who moves freely and who gets moved. Who belongs and who is removed. Whose identity is recognized and whose is erased. Who gets access to care and who doesn’t. Bodily autonomy is the right to self-determination — not just over what happens inside our bodies, but over how we exist in community, in public, in place.

Right now, trans Texans are being targeted. Drag performers are being criminalized. Intersex Texans are being erased. Pregnant people are being surveilled. Immigrants are being caged. These are not separate fights. They are all fighting for the same basic principle: that we, not the state, determine who we are, where we go, and where we belong.

To every Trans, Nonbinary, and Intersex Southerner living reproductive justice by being you: We see you. To every immigrant family separated and moved against your will: We see you. Our struggles are linked. Always have been.