Kansas Revokes Transgender Drivers Licenses

By: Frankie Hicks

My childhood lives in Texas. If you close your eyes, you can probably picture it. Vast, uninterrupted blue sky providing the backdrop for spitting mad preachers and angry white men in camo baseball caps. Being homeschooled, I was isolated among people desperate to isolate themselves, frothing at the mouth to secede from the United States for all the wrong reasons. Lonely among loners, and repressing truths about myself that would have gotten me humiliated, hurt, or worse. At age nine, and 10, and 11, and 12, I knew nothing about the existence of transgender people, much less whatever I was. I just knew there was something dangerous about me. 

Eventually, I found words that approximate how I feel, and I carved out a life for myself, but the feeling of danger never went away. Childhood for transgender Texans is getting harder, but, contrary to what they say, politicians are coming after transgender adults, as well – ultimately seeking to eradicate evidence of our existence from public life. The most troubling news lately comes from the state of Kansas, where about 130 transgender adults received personal letters from the state government on February 25th, stating their drivers licenses with the correct gender markers must be surrendered and replaced with documents reflecting one’s sex assigned at birth. The letter explicitly noted “the Legislature did not include a grace period for updating credentials,” a bizarre way of rolling out new rules effectuated by a rushed bill that went into law the day after the letters were sent. Trans people are now forced to somehow get to Kansas’s equivalent of the DMV without driving – as driving without a valid license is a misdemeanor in the state – and pay money to subject themselves to a license with a gender marker incongruent with their identity.

The newly-passed law SB 244 effectively makes it illegal to be transgender in Kansas. Transgender Kansans can no longer drive, vote, get a library card, or participate in civic life with the gender marker they fought to acquire. Every time someone trans pulls out their license, they will be outed, inviting unnecessary danger into their daily lives. Tacked onto this law is an anti-trans bathroom ban that includes private businesses on the list of places transgender people must out themselves, forced to choose between entering the bathroom of the sex they were assigned at birth or risk a $1000 fine or misdemeanor. Of course, because of my own reality as a trans person, I know this dilemma all too well. As a minor, I had to use the teacher bathrooms at school once I came out as trans, and as an adult, most often I simply refuse to go to the bathroom in public. 

Being transgender, I take an interest in hearing from other trans voices over the disinformation mass media often peddles. It was a trans-led online newspaper that first broke the story from Kansas; and it is from transgender people living in Kansas that I hear at least one person not born in-state but merely residing in it had their license revoked despite never changing their gender marker, only their name. Indeed, at least 4 trans people have had their licenses revoked by the state despite not changing their gender markers at all. People are scared this means the state of Kansas has a “registry” of transgender people living in Kansas and is in the process of combing through it. I grimly remember the very real registry Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton created in 2022 of people who changed both their name and gender marker. 

This news troubles me greatly. To write this story, it has taken days of research interspersed with long periods of grief as more horrifying news comes out by the hour. Confronting this gruesome reality is hard. Staring at a blank wall is easy. Between bouts of depression, I did the math on approximately how many people this Kansas law affects. Most outlets reporting on this agree that it’s about 1,800 people forced to surrender their license – but many more will be impacted. The text of the law states that any citizen can sue anyone they think is trans or using the “wrong” restroom, including any cisgender (i.e. not transgender) person who they deem nonconforming. All of this is meant to scare and intimidate people the government doesn’t want living there. What we are seeing from Kansas and other states is similar to the countrywide struggles undocumented immigrants and green card holders face when they appear at scheduled court hearings – only to be arrested and disappeared. Like trans people choosing which bathroom to use for their safety, immigrants are trapped because they played by the rules. But the rules do not apply to the Powers That Be. Forcing minorities to make impossible choices has been the capital “G” Government’s playbook since its inception. 

From these stories, I have felt untold sadness and, yes, fear. But somewhere along the way, I also found a little hope. I learned that there are thousands of trans people in a deeply red state, many of whom are fighting back by joining a lawsuit penned by the ACLU against the Kansas state government. Through experience, I know that, perhaps because of the intense institutional oppression, small communities of like-minded people in red states tend to be tightly bound through shared experiences, and queer life is not as isolating as they want us to believe. I carry the memory of being deeply isolated as a queer youth in Texas, but now as an adult, I wonder how much of my loneliness was self-inflicted or simply out of my control. What society considers “natural” or “normal” is dictated by culture, by in-groups and out-groups, and, vitally, is subject to change. This is what minorities represent: change to the status quo. This is why I am dangerous. If people can change their gender, that means gender is not an immutable fact, but much looser than the boxes society fits all of us into, thus transgender people specifically are a threat to the Natural Way Of Things. They are more scared of us than we should be of them. 

Because of cruel laws like these, we assume life in red states is miserable for those of us who stick out like hitchhikers’ thumbs. Instead, talk to real people, hold their sadness and madness and joy and know that hands that destroy can also create. Bleak situations call for fire and fight, and can give clarity to the oppressed struggling for freedom. Assimilation is not the answer. Solidarity and fighting as one is the solution.