Three months into Kansas’ anti-trans law, confusion and fear persists

When Kansas’ latest anti-trans law took effect on February 26, Matthew Neumann was waiting for the other shoe to drop. Driver’s licenses and birth certificates with updated gender markers became invalid overnight, while public restrooms transformed into hunting grounds for the thousands of transgender Americans living and working in the state.

As the founder and executive director of the LGBTQ Foundation of Kansas, Neumann intended to stand his ground and hold onto his license no matter what notice he’d receive from the government. He told Salon he wanted to be a beacon of resistance as more vulnerable community members scrambled around him to secure their documentation.

“In the community, there was so much confusion and fear,” Neumann said. “There were people running to the DMV and changing it out before they got the letter — if they got the letter. There were people getting the letter, and they didn’t even have a driver’s license. There were people that were not getting the letter asking me, ‘Well, what do I do?’ And we were checking our statuses on the website to see if we had a valid driver’s license for over a month.”

From where Neumann stood in rural Larned, the shoe never quite fell. But all hell did break loose in other ways.

Senate Bill 244 was sweeping in its scope. As soon as it was published in the state register, it invalidated nearly 2,000 driver’s licenses as well as adding bathroom restrictions that opened transgender Kansans up to legal penalties. The immediate aftermath of the bill was chaotic, with trans Kansans who had previously updated their licenses unable to legally drive to the nearest DMV to sort them out. But in the three months since, confusion has taken over as the distribution of notices regarding the validity of transgender Kansans’ documents remains uneven and confounding bathroom constraints make clear the provision was never about protecting women’s privacy as proponents argued.

Democratic Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed SB 244 when it arrived on her desk in mid-February, but lawmakers overrode her decision just five days later. In a statement after the override, Kelly derided the legislation as a “poorly drafted bill with significant, far-reaching consequences.”

“It is nothing short of ridiculous that the Legislature is forcing the entire state, every city and town, every school district, every public university to spend taxpayer money on a manufactured problem,” Kelly added, in part. “Kansans elected them to focus on education, job creation, housing and grocery costs.”

“All of this is mass confusion, and I think that was their goal because it’s all a guessing game that the trans people of Kansas are trying to play here,” said Neumann, who as of early June, had still not received notice nor confirmation via the DMV website that his license is invalid. “We don’t know what they’re doing because they’re not talking to us — because they’ve never talked to the trans people of Kansas. They didn’t talk to us about this beforehand. They didn’t talk to us about it during it because they rushed it through, and they haven’t talked to us about it since.”

“When I go in there and update my driver’s license the next time [in 2028], I’m not going to tell them I’m transgender,” Neumann added. “They’re going to have to figure that out on their own.”

SB 244’s authorization in late February redefined “gender” to mean “biological sex at birth” under Kansas law and immediately invalidated both the updated birth certificates and driver’s licenses of transgender Kansans. As a result, SB 244 required the government to “correct” the gender marker on those documents to comply with the law, send written notice to the affected parties to surrender their invalid licenses and issue new compliant licenses.

The legislation also directed Kansas’ Department of Health and Environment’s Office of Vital Statistics to invalidate and amend previously changed birth certificates in its database, requiring any transgender Kansan seeking a copy of their compliant documentation to request and pay the $20 reissue fee. The office notes in an FAQ that it has no means of notifying those affected of the change to their birth certificate, a fact some of Neumann’s friends learned by going directly to the Topeka office.

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The law further prohibits Kansans from using a government-owned, public bathroom that doesn’t align with their birth-assigned sex, creating three tiers of legal response. The first finding of a violation results in a warning informing them of future penalties for any further offense. A second violation carries a $1,000 fine and a third slaps them with a class B misdemeanor. The bathroom provision also empowers other Kansans to file lawsuits seeking damages up to $1,000 against someone they believe to have violated the law.

Harper Seldin, a senior staff attorney for the ACLU’s LGBTQ and HIV Project, told Salon that the law makes it next to impossible to be a transgender person in Kansas, effectively pushing the community out of public life.

“If you cannot use the restroom at work, you cannot be employed. If you cannot use the restroom at school, you cannot go to school. If you cannot use your driver’s license without fear of being outed as transgender — which many people treat as extraordinarily private information, in part because of the risk of harassment, or even untoward questions — you really can’t go about your life,” he told Salon. “Think of all the things that you need to use a driver’s license for in Kansas, including vote.”

The escalating tier of penalties and the “bounty-hunter provision” tied to the bathroom restriction have also stoked fear among transgender Kansans that causes them to “self-police” to avoid violating the law, Seldin said. Trans people in the state constantly worry they’re being surveilled and that others are willing to investigate or punish them for using the restroom.

“Other states have enacted restroom restrictions, but they have oftentimes not had penalties run directly to transgender people,” Seldin said, adding: “This [restriction], along with one in Idaho, is a new escalation where suddenly people can be criminalized for just being themselves in public.”

So far, neither the ACLU or LGBTQ Foundation of Kansas is aware of any lawsuits filed seeking to penalize a transgender person for using the bathroom that does not align with their sex assigned at birth. Still, threats against transgender people, regardless of which public, multi-use bathroom they use, abound.

Neumann said the death threats he usually receives have ramped up since the bill took effect and underscored how the law puts the lives of transgender men who are now forced to use women’s restrooms at risk. Many trans Kansans have also become “refugees” as they, with his organization’s help, attempt to move to places like California, Washington, Minnesota or Illinois.

With SB 244 in place, Neumann said his greatest fear, living in a state with concealed carry and stand-your-ground laws, has become using a woman’s restroom.

Say “I go into a bathroom, and I encounter a woman, and I scare her,” he said, explaining his decision to continue using the men’s restroom. “I’ve been telling people on interviews, ‘What if she goes out and gets her husband?’ I said that yesterday to somebody, and the woman said, ‘You wouldn’t make it to my husband. I carry my own gun.’”

A friend of Neumann’s who just started a job working in the kitchen of a state-run mental health facility has instead taken to self-policing, he recalled. After confirming with his employer that he’d be required to use the women’s restroom despite being “passable,” he reluctantly chose to comply over standing his ground because the penalties are so severe.

“’I can’t risk that because I’m not you. I don’t have my own foundation,'” Neumann’s friend had told him.

But transgender people choosing to stay in Kansas have the potential for relief. On the same day SB 244 took effect, the national and state ACLU filed a lawsuit challenging the law in the District Court of Douglas County. The law, the complaint argues, violates the Kansas Constitution’s protections for privacy, equality under the law, due process, personal autonomy and freedom of speech.

While the judge overseeing the case denied a request for a temporary restraining order pausing the law’s effects in March, Seldin said that they’re awaiting a decision on a request for a temporary injunction halting the law for the duration of the case. He remains hopeful, however, after a different Douglas County judge issued a temporary pause on a youth gender-affirming care ban enacted in the state last year pending an ACLU lawsuit challenging the law.

The court’s genuine engagement with the facts of being transgender and the impacts of such legislation in that case demonstrates what is possible, he said.

“It took a while for the court to hold a hearing and then review all the facts and issue the opinion, but I think it’s a good example that even though some of these things take time, there can be justice at the end of the day for transgender people,” Seldin said.