Archived version

The Arkansas Supreme Court recently reinstated a ban on using a nonbinary gender designation on state ID cards. A lower court had previously blocked a rule barring the use of “X” as an option for gender, but now the ban is back in effect. Opponents have attacked the rule as “erasing” trans and nonbinary people.

Arkansas governor Sarah Sanders has been leading a similar charge throughout the state bureaucracy. Early in her term, she issued executive orders banning the use of “woke” terms like “LatinX,” “pregnant people,” and “birth giver.” Sanders herself admitted that the actual use of these terms was almost nonexistent—able only to cite a single state Health Department example for using language like “human milk.”