A second transgender candidate running for a seat in the Republican-majority Ohio House is at risk of being disqualified from the ballot after omitting her former name on circulating petitions.
The Mercer County Board of Elections is set to vote Thursday on whether Arienne Childrey, a Democrat from Auglaize County and one of four transgender individuals campaigning for the Legislature, is eligible to run after not disclosing her previous name, also known as her deadname, on her petition paperwork.
A little-used Ohio elections law, unfamiliar even to many state elections officials, mandates that candidates disclose any name changes in the last five years on their petitions paperwork, with exemptions for name changes due to marriage. But the law isn’t listed in the 33-page candidate requirement guide and there is no space on the petition paperwork to list any former names.
Really sounds like we just found some old ass rule on the books and we’re using it to discriminate against trans people specifically.
The old ass rule has a legitimate purpose, but this isn’t it.
The one it originally happened to has a father who is a conservative politician in the state and likely wanted to avoid the hit to his own numbers from people knowing about his child.
When people pointed out it wasn’t enforced, someone was going to use it for everyone else too
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.
No, the person you replied to hit the nail on the head.
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.
It’s never been used before.
Selectively enforcing for a certain segment of the population an unadvertised rule is total copshit
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?
Yes there is evidence. Just a few days ago a third trans candidate in Ohio ran into the same problem and their board of elections overturned the rejection during their appeal.
So this year you’ve had 3 trans candidates with the same problem. 2 upheld and 1 overturned during the appeals process.
Would you make a divorced woman use her ex husband’s last name when running for office? Same difference.
That would fall under the exemption due to marriage too, I expect. She should just marry her dog
Dang whats in the water in Ohio? . . . Oh right vinyl chloride from freight train accidents.
Oh it’s the Ohio legislature I’m sure they’ll follow the law and the will of the people striving to create a fair democratic government. /s
Nah they’re going to tell her no, and possibly make the law stricter because we’re their present target since their attempt to ban abortion was stopped. Oh they may attempt to gerrymander harder too, but that might not be mathematically feasible
Sounds like another case of “i didn’t read the rules, so it’s not my fault”. Ignorance of the law doesn’t change the law. And it’s not a law “aimed” at trans people. It’s been around far longer than this ‘movement’ has.
As per the excerpt of the article in this post:
But the law isn’t listed in the 33-page candidate requirement guide and there is no space on the petition paperwork to list any former names.
So it seems to me that it’s a law that in practice bans running within five years of (non marriage) name changes. Whether it’s unevenly enforced or not it clearly hits trans people disproportionately.
The “Law” is still on the books. It sucks, but again,Ignorance of the Law doesn’t make it not the Law. Now that it’s getting publicity, maybe people can start following the rules.
If the official paperwork makes it impossible to follow the law, how then can these people run for office? If the law is on the books, then the forms should be made to include this option. That it doesn’t is akin to entrapment.
I’m not saying it’s “right”, I’m saying if you want to do it, you have to play by their rules. That’s all there is too it.
