The Comings & Goings column is about sharing the professional successes of our community. We want to recognize those landing new jobs, new clients for their business, joining boards of organizations and other achievements. Please share your successes with us at [email protected]. 

Congratulations to Gil Pontes III on his recent appointment to the Financial Advisory Board for the City of Wilton Manors, Fla. Upon being appointed he said, “I’m honored to join the Financial Advisory Board for the City of Wilton Manors at such an important moment for our community. In my role as Executive Director of the NextGen Chamber of Commerce, I spend much of my time focused on economic growth, fiscal sustainability, and the long-term competitiveness of emerging business leaders. I look forward to bringing that perspective to Wilton Manors — helping ensure responsible stewardship of public resources while supporting a vibrant, inclusive local economy.”

Pontes is a nonprofit executive with years of development, operations, budget, management, and strategic planning experience in 501(c)(3), 501(c)(4), and political organizations. Pontes is currently executive director of NextGen, Chamber of Commerce. NextGen Chamber’s mission is to “empower emerging business leaders by generating insights, encouraging engagement, and nurturing leadership development to shape the future economy.” Prior to that he served as managing director of The Nora Project, and director of development also at The Nora Project. He has held a number of other positions including Major Gifts Officer, Thundermist Health Center, and has worked in both real estate and banking including as Business Solutions Adviser, Ironwood Financial. For three years he was a Selectman, Town of Berkley, Mass. In that role, he managed HR and general governance for town government. There were 200+ staff and 6,500 constituents. He balanced a $20,000,000 budget annually, established an Economic Development Committee, and hired the first town administrator.

Pontes earned his bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.

Republican representatives in the Kansas Legislature recently passed a bill that bans people from using restrooms in government buildings that do not align with their sex assigned at birth. The bills SB 224 and HB2426 initially focused on rewriting legislation surrounding driver’s licenses but after amendments, the bill would not only stop trans people from updating their gender on these driver’s licenses but force people to surrender their existing licenses. These bills also carry the most severe anti-trans bathrooms ban of any state. 

According to Erin Reed for Erin In The Morning (EITM), “the measures would now even empower private citizens to act as bounty hunters — entering private business to search for transgender people in bathrooms and sue them for alleged violations.” 

The bills would allow anyone to report any people who utilize any bathrooms that do not align with their gender assigned at birth. Anyone who believes that someone has entered a restroom not in alignment with their gender assigned at birth can complain and pursue $1,000 in damages. The first time that someone complains about a person using the “wrong” bathroom, that person can face a written warning for their first violation. The second violation would require them to pay a $1,000 fine, and with each additional violation, they could receive a misdemeanor resulting in another fine or up to six months in jail. 

The Kansas Attorney General’s office is then responsible for determining whether the person has to pay the fine. Allowing people to police bathroom spaces is reminiscent of Florida’s bathroom law that allows transgender people to face criminal penalties, but even more dangerous, the bills extend this enforcement from “government-owned buildings” to private spaces. 

Government entities that manage bathrooms and locker rooms at public schools and universities, highway rest areas, and public parks are now required to assign a gender designation to multi-occupancy private facilities or face a $25,000 fine for the first violation and a $125,000 fine for any additional violations.

There is a section, Reed notes, that creates a “private right of action,” making it the first law to penalize trans people directly for using the restroom and would extend bathroom bans into private spaces. “Without the option of single-person or family alternatives, this essentially forces trans people out of public life by denying us the right to even relieve ourselves or wash up,” Isaac Johnson of Trans Lawrence Coalition told EITM. 

“Denying access to basic public amenities doesn’t just inconvenience people; it relegates them to second class citizenship,” Allison Chapman of Lawyers for Good Government told EITM. 

The legislation flew through the Kansas Congress (and by using procedural maneuvers, Republican lawmakers ensured that there was no public input on the bill). The bill is now heading to the Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly’s desk for signature. Thankfully, Kelly, a Democrat who has consistently vetoed anti-trans legislation, vetoed it, but even so, it could be passed if Kansas Republicans get the support of two-thirds of lawmakers in both chambers. 

The quick passage of these bills, and using the “gut-and-go” measure to ensure people had no opportunity to provide feedback after the bathroom elements were added, has drawn swift criticism.

The bills themselves have deeply unsettling historical parallels to slave catcher laws that allowed “bounty hunters” to track down and return escaped enslaved individuals to their enslavers for a cash reward. Federal laws, like the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850, enabled “bounty hunters” to operate even in free Northern states. These “bounty hunters,” also known as “slave catchers” or “kidnapping clubs” frequently kidnapped free Black people and sold them back into slavery, in what has been called the “Reverse Underground Railroad.” 

Both of these acts provided little to no protection to free Black Americans; in fact, these acts aided and abetted this violence by incentivizing the kidnapping and sale of people of color into slavery. Even if free people had official “freedom papers,” many kidnappers destroyed these documents, and even free people of color typically could not testify in court. Free and previously enslaved Black children who had escaped to the North were especially vulnerable to “slave catchers” because they often did not know how to assert their rights.

In fact, ICE’s kidnapping of five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos echoes this long history of child snatching in the U.S., from bounty hunters capturing and selling Black children into slavery. 

This legislation also reeks of Texas Senate Bill 8 (SB 8), enacted in September 2021, that allowed private citizens to sue anyone who aids or performs an abortion after the detection of a fetal heartbeat, around six weeks of pregnancy. At the time, this was the most severe anti-abortion legislation on the books. It has remained there for five years, leading to a number of Rule 202 petitions that aim to collect more information that would provide a person who has violated SB 8. 

Just this past month, the Texas Supreme Court heard oral arguments for Sadie Weldon v. The Lilith Fund, a case where a private Texas citizen sought to depose Neesha Davé, deputy director of the Lilith Fund, a nonprofit that supports people seeking abortions. The case will not rule on SB 8’s constitutionality but would open a path to challenge the law. 

Bathrooms have long been a battleground to police people’s bodies, and this new Kansas soon-to-be law is no different. Think of segregation in the Jim Crow South between the 1890s and the mid-1960s when some White people acted as vigilantes ensuring that Black people remained out of “white-only” restrooms and other “white-only” spaces.

Just as Rep. Susan Hemphries, a Wichita-based Republican who brought the bill to the House floor said that the legislation is about the privacy for and safety of women, bathroom segregation was often justified by painting Black male sexuality as a threat to white women.

This even extended to the perceived threat of Black women in white women’s restrooms, with one group of white women in Detroit going on strike to protest the order prohibiting discrimination of people working in government and defense industries. These white women argued that they would contract syphilis from sharing toilet seats with Black women.

These new bills and all other anti-trans bathroom legislation, as many have argued, are the continuation of these racist bathroom restrictions.

There is deep historical precedence not only for policing public (and private) bathroom access but also enabling private citizens to act as bounty hunters. This form of bounty hunting threatens not just trans women but all women who anyone does not “assume” is cisgender who may be subject to legal complaints. As Orien Rummler reported for the 19th and them, anti-trans legislation and rulings threaten the rights of all women, especially cis women of color. And as science has long proved, gender is not binary–so it raises the question of how intersex people will be policed in these restrooms. 

And by commodifying the bounty, it emboldens anti-trans violence, and misogynistic violence writ large, in the most intimate of public and private spaces. 

Emma Cieslik is a museum worker and public historian.

Transgender people across Kansas received letters in the mail on Wednesday demanding the immediate surrender of their driver’s licenses following passage of one of the harshest transgender bathroom bans in the nation. Now the American Civil Liberties Union is filing a lawsuit to block the ban and protect transgender residents from what advocates describe as “sweeping” and “punitive” consequences.

Independent journalist Erin Reed broke the story Wednesday after lawmakers approved House Substitute for Senate Bill 244. In her reporting, Reed included a photo of the letter sent to transgender Kansans, requiring them to obtain a driver’s license that reflects their sex assigned at birth rather than the gender with which they identify.

According to the reporting, transgender Kansans must surrender their driver’s licenses and that their current credentials — regardless of expiration date — will be considered invalid upon the law’s publication. The move effectively nullifies previously issued identification documents, creating immediate uncertainty for those impacted.

House Substitute for Senate Bill 244 also stipulates that any transgender person caught driving without a valid license could face a class B misdemeanor, punishable by up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine. That potential penalty adds a criminal dimension to what began as an administrative action. It also compounds the legal risks for transgender Kansans, as the state already requires county jails to house inmates according to sex assigned at birth — a policy that advocates say can place transgender detainees at heightened risk.

Beyond identification issues, SB 244 not only bans transgender people from using restrooms that match their gender identity in government buildings — including libraries, courthouses, state parks, hospitals, and interstate rest stops — with the possibility for criminal penalties, but also allows for what critics have described as a “bathroom bounty hunter” provision. The measure permits anyone who encounters a transgender person in a restroom — including potentially in private businesses — to sue them for large sums of money, dramatically expanding the scope of enforcement beyond government authorities.

The lawsuit challenging SB 244 was filed today in the District Court of Douglas County on behalf of anonymous plaintiffs Daniel Doe and Matthew Moe by the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Kansas, and Ballard Spahr LLP. The complaint argues that SB 244 violates the Kansas Constitution’s protections for personal autonomy, privacy, equality under the law, due process, and freedom of speech.

Additionally, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a temporary restraining order on behalf of the anonymous plaintiffs, arguing that the order — followed by a temporary injunction — is necessary to prevent the “irreparable harm” that would result from SB 244.

State Rep. Abi Boatman, a Wichita Democrat and the only transgender member of the Kansas Legislature, told the Kansas City Star on Wednesday that “persecution is the point.”

“This legislation is a direct attack on the dignity and humanity of transgender Kansans,” said Monica Bennett, legal director of the ACLU of Kansas. “It undermines our state’s strong constitutional protections against government overreach and persecution.”

“SB 244 is a cruel and craven threat to public safety all in the name of fostering fear, division, and paranoia,” said Harper Seldin, senior staff attorney for the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Rights Project. “The invalidation of state-issued IDs threatens to out transgender people against their will every time they apply for a job, rent an apartment, or interact with police. Taken as a whole, SB 244 is a transparent attempt to deny transgender people autonomy over their own identities and push them out of public life altogether.”

“SB 244 presents a state-sanctioned attack on transgender people aimed at silencing, dehumanizing, and alienating Kansans whose gender identity does not conform to the state legislature’s preferences,” said Heather St. Clair, a Ballard Spahr litigator working on the case. “Ballard Spahr is committed to standing with the ACLU and the plaintiffs in fighting on behalf of transgender Kansans for a remedy against the injustices presented by SB 244, and is dedicated to protecting the constitutional rights jeopardized by this new law.”