The move represents an escalation among Republican-controlled legislatures across the United States in restricting transgender identities in government documents, occurring as similar bills advance in at least seven other states.
Kansas is poised to invalidate approximately 1,700 driver’s licenses and roughly 1,800 birth certificates held by transgender residents under a new law taking effect Thursday. The measure makes Kansas the first state to require reversing changes previously approved for transgender residents’ gender identities in official documents.
Governor Laura Kelly, a Democrat, vetoed the measure, but the Legislature’s Republican supermajorities overrode it last week. The bill prohibits documents from listing any sex other than the one assigned at birth and invalidates any that reflect a conflicting gender identity.
Republican-controlled legislatures across the United States are escalating restrictions on transgender identities in government documents, with similar bills advancing in at least seven other states.
A Widening Pattern Across States
Florida, Tennessee and Texas also do not allow driver’s licenses to reflect a transgender person’s gender identity, and at least eight states besides Kansas have policies barring transgender residents from changing their birth certificates. But only Kansas’ law requires reversing changes previously made for trans residents.
Kansas officials expect to cancel approximately 1,700 driver’s licenses and issue new birth certificates for up to 1,800 people. The Legislature has not earmarked funds to cover the cost, leaving each person to pay $26 for a standard license.
This is the latest in what has become an annual Republican push across the country to roll back transgender rights, fueled by the Trump administration’s policies and rhetoric. Trump and other Republicans characterize research-backed conclusions that gender can change or be fluid as radical “gender ideology.” Republican lawmakers in Kansas regularly describe transgender girls and women as male and say they are protecting women.
Kansas Senate Majority Leader Chase Blasi said Trump’s reelection and other Republican victories in 2024 show that voters want “to return to common sense” on gender. “When I go home, people believe there are just two sexes, male and female,” Blasi said. “It’s basic biology I learned in high school.”
Kansas has adopted a broader slate of restrictions on transgender residents. The state bans gender-affirming care for minors and bars transgender women and girls from competing on female sports teams from kindergarten through college. Transgender people cannot use public restrooms, locker rooms or other single-sex facilities associated with their gender identities in Kansas, though enforcement mechanisms were limited until this year’s law added new provisions.
Impact on Transgender Residents
Transgender people have said that carrying IDs that misgender them opens them to intrusive questions, harassment and even violence when they show the documents to police, merchants, and others.
Democratic state Rep. Abi Boatman, a transgender Air Force veteran appointed in January to fill a vacant Wichita seat, said the law signals that “Kansas Republicans are interested in being on the vanguard of the culture war and in a race to the bottom.”
Anthony Alvarez, a transgender University of Kansas student who works for a pro-LGBTQ rights group, said the constant churn of identification changes — he has obtained four IDs in four years as he changed his name, changed his gender marker and turned 21 — underscores the precarious standing of transgender residents. He had planned to remain in Kansas after graduating with a history degree this spring. “But, they’re just making it harder and harder for me to live in the state that I love,” he said.
How Kansas Built This Path
In 2023, Kansas Republicans halted changes in birth certificates and driver’s licenses by enacting a measure legally defining male and female by a person’s “biological reproductive system” at birth. The prior law did not explicitly mention either document type, but it became the legal mechanism used to block changes.
A lawsuit led to state court decisions that last year permitted driver’s license changes to resume. The new law effectively closes that loophole.
Legislators in at least seven other states are considering bills to prevent transgender people from changing one or both government documents, according to bill-tracking software. But none of those proposed measures would reverse changes already made, according to the analysis.