Trans Folks Stubbornly Continue To Exist In Kansas, Despite New Driver's License Law
Two bad news items and one good one. Come on in!
In February, Republicans in the Kansas Legislature used a scuzzy parliamentary trick to pass a sweeping new anti-trans law without even a pretense of public hearings, sneakily adding an anti-trans “bathroom bill” to an already-controversial proposal to force trans people to list only their “biological sex at birth” on their driver’s licenses or state ID cards. Gov. Laura Kelly (D) vetoed the bill, but Republicans used their supermajorities in both houses to override her veto, and the bigoted bill, SB 244, became law immediately.
That meant that as of February 26, all driver’s licenses and state IDs listing a gender marker different from the holder’s sex at birth suddenly became invalid. No grace period, so transgender Kansans often had a day or less after receiving a notification to get themselves to a DMV to get a new license. In fact, they could only get a new one after surrendering their current ID, so there was no option for many people to even start the process before their IDs became invalid, making them potentially subject to a fine, or even to arrest and jail time if they drove anywhere, including to the damn DMV.
Apparently allowing a few days for people to comply with the war on their identity would have sent a dangerous message that they were sort of human.
Also, if the constant official harassment drives someone to drink, the state also says newly invalidated licenses can’t be used to purchase age-restricted items. No word on whether folks will be allowed to use their cancelled ID to fly the fuck out of Kansas, or if they’ll just have to take a bus and risk being thrown under it.
With the help of the ACLU, two transgender Kansans immediately sued the state to block SB 244; a judge in Douglas County District Court will hear arguments Friday on whether to delay enforcement of both the ID restrictions and the bathroom ban, which allows anyone who suspects someone of using the “wrong” restroom to sue for “damages” of $1000, and probably for compensation for smelling salts.
Andrea Ellis, a woman in Wellington, Kansas, found out from a February 25 letter that her new driver’s license, issued in January to reflect her legal name change in December 2025, would be invalidated, even though she thought she’d anticipated state fuckery by leaving the gender marker on her application as “M.” Nope, she still had to make two separate trips to the DMV so she could surrender her ID and get a new one that also listed her as “M,” but more officially somehow. The linked story doesn’t say the state tried to make her go back to her previous name on the updated license, so what the difference between the old license with her assigned gender marker and her new one is, nobody can explain. Even the people at the DMV couldn’t, or wouldn’t, explain.
On top of all that, there are worries that if SB 244 stands, it will also be used to restrict voting, what with the confluence of people having their identification nullified and Kansas’s already strict voter ID laws — this remains fucking Kris Kobach’s Kansas after all. The mass cancellations of identification documents and the upcoming midterm elections will almost certainly leave some transgender people unable to vote, and even if it’s a tiny percentage of an already small total population (estimated at 22,000), you just know that some Trumper is grinning evilly over that.
Kansans who might be affected by the changes will need to resolve their ID issues before the July 14 primary election registration deadline (the actual primaries are August 8). Even then, there’s no guarantee that poll workers won’t simply turn away someone whose appearance doesn’t match the sex listed on their ID, even if their face does. Some folks may decide it’s not worth the trouble voting, which again is the point, which is one more reason the ACLU hopes to get the law thrown out in court before other states start getting ideas.
US Supreme Court Quietly Requires California Schools To Out Trans Kids To Parents
In yet another ruling against transgender rights, the Supreme Court on Monday issued a “shadow docket” ruling in a lawsuit against California’s law protecting the privacy of trans kids in schools. The order lets stand a lower court’s decision that supports parents who want trans kids to be outed by their schools, and who want to make teachers misgender their kids in the hope that’ll somehow make the kids stop being trans.
While it’s not a final ruling in the case, the unsigned majority opinion doesn’t offer a lot of hope that schools will be able to respect trans kids’ gender identity if the parents object. Until the case makes its way back up to the Supremes for a full hearing and decision, it applies only to California, but as Erin Reed explains, the “parents’ rights” reasoning in the order is likely to affect school policies all over the country, and hands a roadmap to people who want to litigate away any privacy protections for trans kids in schools.
The prospects are pretty dire. The decision, Reed says, will likely end up invalidating California’s law that protects trans kids from being outed to parents by schools, and could also be
used to challenge individual school policies nationwide—even potentially leading to the forced misgendering of transgender youth in safe states. Because of a provision in the lower court injunction that prohibits schools from using different names or pronouns with parents than are being used at school, all parent contact effectively becomes an outing event for transgender students across California.
The language of the order is framed very insistently in terms of parents’ rights to “direct the upbringing and education of their children,” and adopts the framing used by anti-trans activists who say that when schools allow kids to be addressed by a name or pronoun different from what their parents call them, that’s a violation of the parents’ rights, never mind whether it might be good for the mental health of the trans kid.
The ruling restores an injunction issued in December by US District Judge Roger Benitez that, as Reed explains,
prohibits schools from using a different name or set of pronouns with parents than they use with the student at school. In practice, this means a transgender student must consent to being deadnamed and misgendered in class if they want to maintain any privacy from their parents.
And while the case is still making its way through the appeals process, there’s little likelihood the Court’s six rightwing justices will be any friendlier to trans kids when the case comes back to them. The decision says that parents have a due-process right “not to be shut out of participation in decisions regarding their children’s mental health,” even if the parent decides that the best way to address their kid’s gender dysphoria is to insist that no kid of theirs is allowed to be trans, and that’s that.
Fifteen states already have laws forcing schools to out trans kids to their parents, and the Court’s decision Monday will help protect those mandatory-outing laws from challenges. It’s also likely to provide the language and arguments for new challenges to state and school district policies that treat a student’s gender identity as confidential, because parents must have the right to know if their precious child is turning out to be a person different from their parents’ expectations. Going forward, it’s possible that the ruling could even be used to attack trans kids’ rights in blue states that have laws protecting them.
This is just the latest in a string of anti-transgender decisions by the Court that, as Reed points out, “represent a coordinated legal dismantling with little parallel in modern civil rights law.” The case for serious reforms to the Court just keeps getting stronger.
North Carolina Primary Voters Send Clear Message To Anti-Trans Democrats: GTFO
We’ll close with a bit of good news, because Crom knows you could use it after those other stories. In Tuesday’s primary election in North Carolina, Democratic voters said hell no to several conservative D candidates who have voted with Republicans on anti-transgender bills. The votes weren’t even close.
The biggest win was for progressive Dem Veleria Levy, who turfed out incumbent state Rep. Nasif Majeed in a 42-point blowout, winning the primary by 69 percent to 27 percent. Nice! And she managed it after raising only $23,000 for the election, which says a lot about the mood of voters in the district. Republicans didn’t bother running anyone, so Levy will take over the seat after the general election.
Last year, Majeed was the only Democrat in the NC House to join Republicans in overriding Gov. Josh Stein's veto of HB 805, a nasty package of anti-trans legislation. Without Majeed’s deciding vote, the override would have failed, but now North Carolina has a crappy new law that, in Erin Reed’s summary,
banned legal transition through a discriminatory definition of sex, required transgender people's birth certificates to include their assigned sex at birth, extended the statute of limitations for suing gender-affirming care providers, banned gender-affirming care for incarcerated people, and censored school library books.
The anti-trans provisions are clearly the most harmful part of the law, but that library provision was an extra slap in the face to what our party is supposed to believe in. Hey, here’s a slogan: Democrats don’t let Democrats who ban books stay in office.
Levy ran an explicitly progressive, pro-LBGTQ+ campaign, writing on Facebook — in response to winning the endorsement of the Charlotte Observer — that “this campaign has always been about showing up for working families, Seniors, LGBTQ+ neighbors, immigrant communities, veterans and students to ensure our values are consistently represented in Raleigh.” No doubt all her other progressive positions helped, but Majeed’s vote on the anti-trans omnibus really pissed people off. Bye!
Other Democrats who joined Republicans in voting against trans rights (among other issues) also lost. Former state Rep. Michael Wray voted with Rs in 2023 to ban gender-affirming care for minors and to bar trans athletes from school sports; he lost his primary in 2024 to Rodney Pierce by just 34 votes, but when Wray attempted a comeback this year, Pierce whomped him, 64 percent to 36 percent.
Opposition to trans rights wasn’t the only losing position Tuesday. Longtime state Rep. Carla Cunningham was turfed out in a 70 percent to 22 percent loss to Rev. Rodney Sadler, largely because she helped Republicans override Stein’s veto of a measure requiring sheriffs to cooperate with ICE. Not a good look in a year when backlash to Trump’s ethnic cleansing campaign is driving people to protests and the polls.
Why, it’s almost as if the people saying that Democrats need to throw trans people under the campaign bus aren’t in line with actual voter sentiment, at least not in primaries. As Reed notes, the public is increasingly siding with Democrats in polling, because as with immigration, Republicans keep trying to push their culture warring to extremes. Says Reed, “The message from Democratic voters is not subtle. Abandoning transgender people does not win you new supporters—but it may win you an uphill primary challenge you are likely to lose.”
[Assigned Media / Kansas Reflector / ACLU / Kansas Reflector / Democracy Docket / Erin in the Morning / Order in Mirabelli v. Bonta / Erin in the Morning]
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OK, one more bit of good news: Erin Reed's own list of trans Girl Scouts saw a huge boom in GS cookie sales, in a sugary backlash to all the fuckheaded meanness in this country. 330,000 boxes of cookies sold and still rising.
https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/trans-girl-scouts-sell-330000-boxes
May all their children grow up LGBTQ+.