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Kansas Moves to Block Trans People From Correcting Their State IDs
Trans residents who have changed their gender marker with the state will have those changes reversed, the Attorney General has said.
BY JAMES FACTORA
June 29, 2023
Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach answers questions during a news conference about a new state law that defines male...
Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach answers questions during a news conference about a new state law that defines male and female in state law so that transgender people can't change their driver's licenses and birth certificates to reflect their gender identities, Monday, June 26, 2023, at the Statehouse in Topeka, Kansas.AP Photo/John Hanna
Kansas’ Attorney General has filed a motion for permission to block transgender Kansans from correcting their birth certificates, and to change people’s gender marker back to their “biological sex” in state databases if they were able to change them previously.
Trans people in the Sunflower State have been permitted to update the gender markers on their birth certificates since 2019, when a federal court ordered Kansas officials to provide trans people with accurate identification documents. However, the Kansas legislature passed Senate Bill 180 in April, which defines biological sex based on reproductive capacity and effectively bars trans people from updating the gender markers on their state-issued IDs. They would also be forced to use public facilities — including bathrooms, locker rooms, prisons, and abuse shelters — that correspond to their “biological sex.”
Although Governor Laura Kelly vetoed SB 180, the legislature overrode that veto just days later. The law is supposed to go into effect on July 1.
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Because of the 2019 order, though, the state would not be allowed to enforce that law — which is why Attorney General Kris Kobach filed a motion last Friday, June 23, requesting relief from that judgment. The new law would not only block future changes to legal documents, but would also require the state to update its records with people’s sex assigned at birth if they had previously changed it.
In a copy of the filing obtained by Them, Kobach wrote that it would be “impossible” for Kansas to comply with both SB 180 and the 2019 order. “The Consent Judgment requires defendants to issue birth certificates that state a person’s sex as something other than the one he or she was born into; section 1(c) of the bill prohibits this practice,” he continued. “That is enough to warrant modification.”
In a Monday press conference, Kobach further clarified that “if you were a person who transitioned and got a birth certificate reflecting a different sex, that piece of paper can remain with you.”
“There’s nothing in the law that forces someone to surrender a certificate that was changed,” he said, per NBC News. “However, the state’s data will reflect the original sex at birth.”
Five U.S. states — Indiana, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Tennessee — totally ban all changes to gender markers on birth certificates, per the Movement Advancement Project. Other states that have introduced legislation that redefines sex based on reproductive capacity include Montana, which passed its bill into law in May, as well as Alabama.
Lambda Legal — the LGBTQ+ legal advocacy group that filed the lawsuit that resulted in the 2019 order — denounced Kobach’s filing, with legal counsel and health care strategist Omar Gonzalez-Pagan calling the motion “yet another unnecessary and cruel move to target the transgender community with animus and discrimination for political gain.”
“We will vigorously oppose this gimmick by Attorney General Kobach,” Gonzalez-Pagan said in a statement. “Let us be clear, Lambda Legal will not allow the Attorney General to nullify a binding, years-old federal judgment. In the meantime, lest there be any doubt, the state’s Office of Vital Statistics cannot refuse applications to correct gender markers.”
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Trans and Intersex People in Montana Now Banned From Changing Birth Certificates
The new rules are among the most restrictive in the U.S.
The ACLU of Kansas also condemned the action. “No matter how much Attorney General Kobach and extremists in our state legislature may wish to, they cannot erase the fundamental protections the Constitution guarantees to every single LGBTQ+ Kansan,” said Micah Kubic, the organization’s executive director, in a statement. “Mr. Kobach should rethink the wisdom — and the sheer indecency — of this attempt to weaponize his office’s authority to attack transgender Kansans just trying to live their lives.”
This isn’t the first anti-trans measure to gain traction in Kansas. House Bill 2238, which would ban trans girls from competing on school sports teams that align with their gender identity, was also passed, vetoed by the governor, and later overturned by the legislature.
As local news affiliate KSNT reported, LGBTQ+ activists throughout Kansas are planning a series of protests against these discriminatory policies. The statewide political action, called Pride Never Ends, will take place on July 1.
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