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Here at ACLU of Kansas, we’re embarking on a new project: to inform Kansans re-entering from incarceration of their voting rights.

In Kansas, if you’re convicted of a felony, you lose your voting rights while serving your sentence - this is called felony disenfranchisement. Your rights are only restored and you can register to vote after your sentence has been completed. This means that Kansas has a partial disenfranchisement system, in contrast to other states that have complete felony disenfranchisement, meaning that they permanently ban people with felonies from voting ever again.

Unfortunately, because of the varied policies across the country, many Kansans with past felony convictions may not realize their voting rights can ever be restored, even if the solution could be as simple as a brochure included in paperwork from the parole office. Informing people of their rights is an obligation for not only people who work in the criminal legal system, but also for all of us who are in community with or who are returning citizens ourselves.

This work isn’t just for Kansans who are system-impacted – it’s about all of us who care about the strength and inclusion of our democracy.

Felony disenfranchisement, and the lack of education about voting rights restoration after incarceration, is just one thread in a web of tactics that make it harder to vote. In Kansas, most people think politicians should be making it easier, not more difficult, to participate in our democracy. Yet in the 2023 state legislative session, lawmakers attempted to pass a number of laws that would make it harder to vote, including a bill that would have done away with the 3-day window to cast a mail-in ballot. In Wyandotte, Sedgwick, and Johnson County, voters who are more comfortable in languages other than English don’t have access to voting materials in additional languages. In Ellis County, despite the community and student advocates organizing for it for years, there’s no polling location on campus at Fort Hays State University, and in Shawnee County, we’re asking election officials to expand early voting locations – right now, Shawnee County only has one. 

In all of these seemingly different issue areas, there’s one clear throughline – these barriers make it harder to vote for specific groups of people: people of color, young people, people with disabilities, and poor and working class people. This is not a coincidence.

In Kansas and across the country, laws were created to deny people with felonies of their voting rights after the Reconstruction era, as a backlash to a growing political voice: Black voters. By disenfranchising people who had been convicted of a crime, lawmakers could make it harder to vote for the people most impacted by the criminal legal system: people of color. 

We see this legacy today in the felony disenfranchisement laws that remain, and the gap in voting rights restoration education – if people don’t know they have voting rights, how can they participate in our democracy? And if someone’s punishment is prolonged by constantly extended their probation or parole for noncriminal violations, is that also a way to prevent them from voting? 

All voter suppression tactics – whether it’s closing a 3-day window for mailing back your ballot, ignoring the wishes of young voters for a campus polling location, failing to provide materials in Spanish and other languages, or denying the right to vote to people with felonies – have always been about silencing some voices in order for others to maintain power and shirk accountability.

Our access to the ballot box is crucial to ensure that those who have decision-making power over policies directly impacting our families and communities should have to hear from us – and that means all of us.

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• Read more about Voting Rights Restoration is About All of Us

Why do trans people transition? It’s a confusion that lurks behind much of the anti-trans sentiment developing in Kansas and throughout the country.

The most common answer is that trans people transition to escape gender dysphoria: that every trans person experiences a deep and unabiding longing to be the “opposite gender,” a longing that manifests as a discomfort with and need to escape from the physical reality of our own bodies, and so we undergo transition to sever ourselves from the gender we reject and reattach ourselves to the expectations and social role of the gender we prefer. A simple exchange, switching out one gender for another and then continuing onward with our lives as if nothing had happened at all.

I can’t deny that this narrative has some truth—I have experienced gender dysphoria, and longed desperately to escape it. I have, late at night when no one else is awake and I’m alone with my thoughts, wished I could simply live the life of a woman without having to transition at all. Gender dysphoria can be cruel and lonely, and anyone who encounters it will want to leave it behind.

Maybe these things are why I transitioned. But to reduce transition to merely a panicked escape to greener pastures, an abandoning of one kind of gender expression for an equal but opposite one, does a disservice to the opportunities that transition provides us.

I began my transition with a specific image in my mind. Years of social conditioning had taught me what a woman was—and all the myriad ways in which I fell short of that standard. I would learn about women’s fashion and makeup, I thought, and undertake medical interventions to reshape my body. I would leave behind any trace of masculinity and take up womanhood in its place.

But as time went on, my understanding of what I needed to be changed, and so did my priorities. I went through with some elements of medical transition, taking hormones, but realized that many of my goals were misplaced. Parts of myself with which I felt uncomfortable—like my height or my long, straight nose—became less signifiers of my failure as a woman and more just part of who I was. As I learned more about myself, my understanding of the world and my place in it evolved. I became a more caring person, more ready to recognize complexity and uncertainty than I had before. Despite the cruelty that the outside world sometimes directs at people like me, transition strengthened my connections to that world, not diminished them.

If, as I discovered, I could contain so many contradicting desires within myself, then surely others must as well. And if I could embrace those contradictions—embrace change and reinvention—rather than reject them, then what wouldn’t be possible? What new ways of being might we be able to discover, together, if we saw ourselves less as static points in a world of change, but as beings who are constantly changing and rewriting ourselves?

I have never felt anything as sure as the peace that comes with knowing that I am who I decided to be.

Transition cannot be a linear process. We may set out on the journey with a simple goal in mind, but we inevitably find ourselves distracted on the way—what begins as a stroll down the road is interrupted by explorations of newly-discovered paths branching out in new directions. We may return to the main path, or we may not. Ahead of us, all around us, are infinite possibilities.

Every one of us, trans or cisgender, will navigate transition during our lives. Who can say that they are the same person as they were a decade ago? How about five years ago, or one? Any story of growing up, of getting older, is a transition narrative about refashioning oneself in a new stage of life. These transitions are complex and individuated: no two journeys the same, no experiences identical. To embrace transition means believing not only that people can change, but also that change itself defines our existence—that the line between what we are and what we become is thinner than we could have imagined.

To return to the question with which I began this piece: why do we transition? I’m not sure that I know. A question like that is far too personal, its answer too unique to each individual, for me to give a single, sweeping response. What I can say is this: no matter why we decide to start a transition (and I have discussed gender transition, but this concept could apply to other transitions as well: changing careers, moving to a new country, starting a family—all of these and more are also opportunities for discovery), the value of transition lies far outside the bounds of that single moment.    

Transition is important not because of how it ends, but for what we must do to get to that end. It demands that we re-evaluate that which we had considered impossible, braving the unexplored possibilities before us, and commit to finding new ways of living. We, in transition, at once discover and create our own liberation.

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• Read more about Why Do We Transition?

Kansans are ready to take major steps in reforming our criminal legal system, and we’re here to help them do so.

The ACLU of Kansas recently conducted in-depth polling to understand Kansans’ beliefs, and they spoke out resoundingly for civil liberties, fairness, and meaningful justice.

Here were the major takeaways:

1.    Kansans have had enough of our harmful legal system.

Kansans know our criminal legal system is hurting our communities and resoundingly want reform, across partisan and demographic differences. . 

•    Nearly 7 out of 10 Kansans support bail reform. Specifically, they supported a reform that would allow most people who are arrested to return home the same day if they do not pose a flight risk and are not a threat to anyone else. These pre-trial release decisions would be based on individual circumstances – not just how much money someone has.
•    8 out of 10 Kansans support replacing juvenile court fines with alternative accountability measures. This reform would help prevent Kansans families from accumulating massive debt from the court system. 
•    Over half of Kansans support eliminating administrative fees for Kansas kids in the legal system, and with more information, that number grows to 63%.

2.    Kansans are ready for comprehensive marijuana policy reform

It’s no secret that Kansas has fallen well behind neighboring states on marijuana policy—and Kansans want to see that change.

8 of 10 Kansas voters support allowing doctors to prescribe medical marijuana to qualified patients.

Further, 7 of 10 Kansans support removing criminal penalties for marijuana possession.

Not only are Kansans ready for medical marijuana, they support further steps to heal some of the harm done by the War on Drugs, and wants to see Kansas be more in-step with many states’ policies.

3.    The only ones holding back Kansas are those in power.

Not only are these ideas massively popular, they’re popular across different demographics and party affiliations.

For example, the bail reform and juvenile fees reform mentioned earlier were supported by a majority of Democrats, a majority of Republicans, and a majority of Independents.

They’re also supported by a majority of every age group, including 73% of those 65 and older showing support for bail reform. And when broken down by gender or race we see the same pattern: a majority of every group supports these policies.

Given this broad support, we must remind our elected leaders that they work for the people of Kansas, and the people of Kansas support criminal legal reform. 

We’re working to make these reforms a reality in Kansas – and it’s past time to take action. Find out how you can work for a better legal system for you and your fellow Kansans here.
 

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• Read more about 3 major lessons about what Kansans believe in for Criminal Legal Reform—including Legalizing Marijuana