The Costly Cruelty of the Kansas Anti-Trans Driver’s License Law

Victoria Kelly moved across the border from Missouri to
Kansas about four years ago in search of more physician-assistant job
opportunities and life in a bigger city. It was also around this time that she
came out as trans. Back then, the ability to change the gender marker on a Kansas
driver’s license was held up in court, so her first Kansas license had her
legal female name with a marker for male. “Anytime I had to pull that out and
use that, I had to answer a lot of questions and got a lot of strange looks,”
she said. It made her more hesitant to travel by plane, knowing she’d have to
use it at the airport. “It just caused a lot of unnecessary friction in my
life,” she said.

Once she was legally able, she quickly got a new one with
the right gender marker. It cost her $50, and she had to get a letter from her
physician vouching for her, which felt strange. But it helped her be “one step
closer to living life as my true self,” she said.

“I thought I was in the clear,” she added with a laugh. She
ended up being wrong. This February, the Kansas legislature rushed
through an emergency measure, Senate Bill 244, that not only blocked
transgender people from changing their driver’s licenses to reflect their
gender but also applied it retroactively, invalidating any state driver’s
licenses and birth certificates with gender markers that differ from sex
assigned at birth. It also mandates that people use the bathrooms in government
buildings that align with their sex assigned at birth and allows people to
sue if they feel someone in the bathroom with them is violating the law.
Governor Laura Kelly vetoed the measure, only to have the legislature override
it.

Kelly warned
that it would “cost Kansas taxpayers millions of dollars to comply with this
very vague legislation.” Her prediction has now come to pass: Transgender Kansas
residents have had to shell out money for gas to drive to DMVs and secure new licenses,
take days off of work to deal with it, and even contemplate the steep costs of
moving out of a state in which they no longer feel safe.

After the law passed, Kelly assumed she would likely have at
least until the summer to get her ducks in a row and change her license. New
state laws typically take effect in early June. But then she got home from work
on February 25 to find a letter from the state telling her that her license
would be revoked as of February 26 if she didn’t change the gender marker. It
also said that driving without a valid license would be potentially punishable
by jail time. “I read it two or three times. I’m like, ‘Am I missing
something?’” she said. She wasn’t: The law, passed February 18, offered no grace
period, invalidating licenses as of February 26.  

She had to act immediately—she works at four different
clinics around Kansas City, one of which is a 20-minute drive from her home. She
knew she needed a valid license to get to and from work. She also knew that the
potential cost of being arrested and serving jail time would have far-reaching
consequences—it would likely get reported to the state medical board, putting
her professional license and, therefore, her career, at risk. “The panic
started to set in,” she said.

Her partner was able to drop her off and pick her up at work
the next day, and then the following day, a Friday, she had off from work. But
she knew she needed to be able to drive to work the following week. The DMVs in
Kansas don’t take walk-ins, and all of the appointments in her area were full
that Friday. The closest she could find was an appointment in Lawrence, an hour
away. Her partner had to work, so her retired mother-in-law drove her there and
back. “It was definitely an extra cost to her,” she said. She also had to track
down her birth certificate and her name-change paperwork.

In the end, she was able to get a new license the same day. It
cost her about $20, less than she was expecting given that she paid about $50
for a new one after she changed her name. She also had to take a new photo. “It
felt more like a prison mug shot,” she said. “I was basically being forced to
do this against my will and paying for the privilege of it.

“The whole process felt very accusatory,” she added, “[as if] we were being retroactively criminalized for something the state had approved
and stamped.” Normally, a driver’s license is taken away from someone who’s
broken a law. But she hadn’t done anything wrong.

Having a license with the wrong gender marker has meant not
just friction but fear. In May, Kris Ripper, a trans woman living in Kansas,
was pulled
over by a police trooper who asked for her license. After explaining that
she had changed her gender marker to male due to the law she was allowed to go
on her way, but she later got a letter saying she had missed a court date for a
charge of driving without a valid license, a misdemeanor punishable with up to
six months in jail. Although her case was eventually dismissed, Kelly thinks of
it often, especially on her drive to one of the clinics that takes her past a
sheriff’s office and detention center that also has a particularly low speed
limit. “I sweat bullets every time I drive by there,” she said. It’s always in
the back of her head, no matter which clinic she drives to for work: “Am I going
to get pulled over and thrown in jail today?” She drives under the speed limit
just to be safe. “It feels like I’ve got a target on my back,” she said.

She’s also gotten “a lot of invasive questions, a lot of
invasive security measures,” she said. On a recent trip back home from Florida,
she got flagged by the TSA scanner and had to get a pat-down in her groin area.
It “caused a lot of extra distress,” she said. “I ended up going to the
restroom and crying for a few minutes.” She’s rethinking her desire to
travel both domestically and internationally and is considering avoiding it for
a while. She feels “hemmed in,” adding that it “makes you just want to stay
home and hide from the world sometimes.” On a day-to-day basis, she tries to go
about her life not thinking about being trans until someone at the liquor store
questions her ID or a bouncer looks askance at it, asking if it’s really her. What
if one of them tries to confiscate it, believing it’s fake? “You don’t realize
how often you use and need your driver’s license,” she said. “It’s a huge
burden.”

Transitioning can feel like “a never-ending marathon,” she
said, an endless string of tasks from name-change paperwork to medical
intervention. Before this, she felt that she had finally gotten close to the
finish line. “It’s really, really discouraging to take a step backward.”

Many trans Kansas residents feel like they can’t stay in the
state with this law in effect. “This was the final straw on a lot of trans
people in Kansas,” said Matthew Neumann, executive director of the LGBTQ
Foundation of Kansas. He gets three to five requests every week from people
asking for help with moving. That isn’t a cheap thing to pull off. After Senate
Bill 244 passed, his organization started helping people with relocation costs
for the first time, covering safety deposits and first month’s rent, typically
about $500. But he knows there are many other costs they’ll face—he estimated
people need $2,000 to $3,000 each. “We wish we had the funds to just move people,”
he said. It’s frustrating when he has to turn someone down or tell them they
have to wait. “That could be devastating to somebody, to keep them from moving.”

Susan (a pseudonym) moved to the U.S. over a decade ago after
“meeting a girl online” and falling in love. She’s been living in Kansas ever
since. She loves the state’s natural beauty. “The Flint Hills grew on me,” she
said. “The sky is incomparable.” Her wife, meanwhile, is a lifelong Kansan. The
two live in the house her wife grew up in. “This is her home,” she said. The
two of them have built a close-knit community that they consider chosen family.

“As much as I love Kansas, Kansas does not love me back,” Susan said. For many years, Kansas springs have meant the same thing: The
legislature debates anti-trans laws, and she and her wife contemplate moving
away from the home they’ve built. But when Senate Bill 244 passed this year,
she says, “That was kind of our hard line.” Susan was never able to change her
license gender marker—it’s far harder to do as a green card holder—but the
bathroom part of the bill is forcing them to move. Even though the law only
impacts government buildings, the general public doesn’t always know that.
“There have been a couple instances of me trying to go into a restroom and
being told that I’m not allowed to be there,” she said. Even weightier is
knowing that getting arrested—even if it doesn’t end in a charge—could lead to
her green card being revoked.

If the November midterm elections result in big Democratic congressional wins, they’ll move within the U.S., to a blue state with strong
trans rights protections. But if not, they’ll leave the country altogether. No
matter which they choose, they’ll be leaving behind their family and “starting
fresh,” Susan said.

They are selling her wife’s childhood home to enable the
move. They’ve been fortunate to find affordable options in other states, and
Susan works remotely, which means she can keep her job after they relocate. But
the costs of renting a U-Haul and actually moving will be hefty, reaching
several thousand dollars. They’re trying to get rid of as many of their
belongings as they can before they move, selling some to defray the costs. The
process has been stressful, as has helping her wife prepare for what it’s like
to move to an entirely new place. They are “trying to think of all the
positives of moving so that the stresses of it don’t hurt so much,” she said.

“If they weren’t trying to whittle away my rights every
year, we would absolutely stay here,” she said. “This has become home.”

Kansas is home for Charley too, and he’s determined to stay.
He’s lived in the state most of his life and loves being able to see endless
sky from the top of a hill or watch the Milky Way from his back porch. “I love
the grasses and the way they turn red in the fall,” he said. In 2022, he
changed his gender marker on his driver’s license and passport, paying hundreds
of dollars in fees to get it completed and spending a year on the effort. After
Trump was reelected in 2024, he changed his birth certificate too. It was “a
relief to have things match how I present,” he said. “It just makes life
simpler to have it all match what people expect to see.” He had been following Senate
Bill 244 as it was debated, and before it passed he got his license with the
correct gender marker on it renewed, costing him about $23.

But then Charley saw a copy of the letter being sent to
people saying their licenses were no longer valid, posted online late at night
before bed. “I’m like, ‘Oh shit, I’m going to wake up tomorrow morning and my
license is not going to be valid,’” he recalled. Luckily his boss was
understanding, allowing him to take a half day off work to get driven into town
by a friend so he could get his license changed, paying another $8. Before he
went into the office, he gave himself a fresh haircut and wore a shirt that
displayed his biceps. “I scowled into the camera when they took my picture,” he
said. “I deliberately went in just as masculine as I could get.”

It was only later that he learned that many trans people
haven’t received letters from the state; now he regrets acting so quickly. He’s
left in a situation where his license doesn’t match his birth certificate. He’s
insulated from a lot of the effects—he doesn’t tend to get carded due to age,
and he’s started using his passport in airports instead of his license—but it
does pop into his mind when he passes police while driving. “It’s just a little
extra anxiety,” he said.

He’s contemplated moving somewhere else, but Kansas is the
first place he really put down roots, buying a house he’s put not just money into
but “a lot of my heart,” he said. “I am not going to lose my house, I am not
going to lose my job for this,” he said. He has a secure financial situation
and a community of chosen family. “I might as well fight it here where I’ve got
a foundation under me.”

“They can pry it from my cold dead hands,” he said. “And
they’re kind of trying.”

Like Charley, Neumann also hasn’t received a letter from the
state even though he changed the gender marker on both his birth certificate
and license. For a while after the letters started going out, he would go on
the state’s website daily to check whether his license was valid or not. When
we spoke in late June, it still was. The situation has led to “mass confusion,”
he said. “The emotional damage was really, I think, their goal towards the trans
community. That fear, panic, confusion.” For him personally, it means that when
he visits a specialist doctor, an 85-mile drive he does three or four times a
month, he’s started driving well under the speed limit just in case. “You’re
always waiting for that second shoe to drop,” he said.

Anytime he drives to his doctor’s office and has to use the
bathroom on the way he knows he could get in trouble depending on where he stops.
His physical therapist accepts Medicaid and Medicare; does that make it a
government building, and does that mean he’s breaking the law when he uses the
men’s room there? He’s already anticipating problems when he needs to use the
bathroom at his child’s volleyball games at her public high school, technically
a government building. “I’ve received threats,” he said, people referencing
their guns.

“This didn’t just go away because they passed a law. This is
our lives,” Neumann said. “It’s still here, and it’s still affecting us.” ...