once again VERY quickly glancing at the flood of notes as they rush by me, and this set of tags from @the-cassquatch caught my eye:
it was basically rushed through. there's a vague timeline on this that starts in 2023, when a law (i don't remember which one at this point) was passed trying to define gender as being only male or female in kansas and restricting what bathrooms we're allowed to use in government facilities and shit like that, and Kris Kobach tried to take that law and say "THIS MEANS YOU CAN'T CHANGE YOUR SEX/GENDER ON YOUR BIRTH CERTIFICATE OR DRIVER'S LICENSE" and in June of 2023 all such actions across the state were frozen by a county judge.
it was initially expected that this freeze would end in a matter of weeks because you can only put a hold on these things via judicial action for so long. they managed to keep this tied up in legal limbo for almost 2 and a half years, though. in October of 2025, that ruling was finally and decisively overturned, and we were able to start changing our gender markers again.
that's when i finally changed mine. (i had received my updated birth certificate on a saturday in june of 2023, and the judge put a hold on gender marker changes the following monday, bright and early. i woke up early all excited to go update my driver's license only to find out i couldn't.)
anyway, we knew in October of 2025 that Kansas Republicans (who hold a supermajority in our legislature, if that wasn't clear) were going to do something to fuck with all of that again. we've known this was coming. it just got pushed through way faster than expected, and in the most cruel and inhumane way possible. the lack of grace period on updating our IDs is likely due to manifold influence, but more on that in a moment.
SB 244, the bill that resulted in the ID of every kansan who has legally transitioned being revoked LITERALLY OVERNIGHT, was introduced in its current form on January 27th, 2026. It passed the house 87 to 36 on January 28th, and passed the senate 30 to 9 on the same day. Our governor, gods help her, was presented the bill on February 3rd, 2026. She vetoed it on February 16th, 2026.
On February 17th, the senate voted to override that veto, 31 to 9; and on February 18th, the house voted to override the veto, 87 to 37.
we knew this was coming, and we knew it was coming fast, but it has been less than a month since the bill was introduced, and the kansas legislature website is an archaic piece of shit. the news in kansas mostly leans pro-republican, so there's little reason for them to cover this in a way that's actually helpful and informative, and that's assuming you even trust mainstream news enough to watch it at all.
tl;dr: we have known about this bill in its current form for less than a month. we received no information about its implementation or when, exactly, it would go into effect until, as far as i can tell, very literally yesterday. and it is in effect today.
