Some of you will remember my post from late October about Amber Yust, a trans woman in San Francisco who was sent hate mail by a DMV employee after she had been into the city office to change her driver’s license. It has been 6 weeks now, and in that time the DMV has done absolutely nothing. They won’t talk to the media, they won’t talk to the Transgender Law Center, they haven’t even had the decency to apologize to Amber for what happened, presumably because they don’t want to admit any liability.

At this point Amber and the TLC have no choice but to initiate legal action, because really you cannot allow this sort of thing to go on.

In the intervening time other facts have come to light. Not only did the perp send Amber hate mail himself, he passed her address on to an extreme right wing religious group who also contacted her. And when I say “extreme right wing”, I’m talking people who split from the Catholic Church because the Pope was not conservative enough for them. (See this Chronicle article.)

Also it seems likely that the perp in question has previous. There was an earlier instance of a DMV clerk refusing to serve a trans woman. After that event the DMV got people in to provide “sensitivity training” for their staff (see MSNBC). But it looks like behind the scenes what they actually said to their staff was, “if you must be a bigot, don’t do it on the job, wait until you are out of the office so that we can deny responsibility.”

It is hard to see what the DMV’s problem is here. This is such an egregious breach of confidentiality that it would be hard to make it a religious persecution issue. The local media has been very supportive of Amber, and one of the most supportive reactions I got to my post about the case was from a Christian (thank you, Ben). They might have been concerned about political ramifications, given that elections were due in November, but now that California has returned Democrats for both Governor and Attorney General I can’t see that anyone’s job would be on the line for doing the decent thing. The only conclusion that I can come to is that the DMV’s management just doesn’t fucking care. They think that allowing wacko staff to persecute trans people is perfectly OK, because who gives a damn about that sort of person anyway?

And yes, this is in San Francisco.

So, legal stuff will happen. My best wishes go out to my pals Masen and Katrina at TLC who will have a difficult job ahead of them, and of course to Amber who is bravely putting herself in the firing line.

This is probably going to be expensive, and I’m guessing that the major LGBT communities in California have committed most of their funds to fighting Prop. 8, so TLC will probably need help. You can donate here. I have just done so.