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Since its enactment, the driver's license law has left trans Kansans unsure of how to navigate everyday life

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#kansas #trans rights #drivers licenses #bathroom bill #gender marker

Wyoming has quietly become the ninth US state to effectively ban gender marker changes on driver’s licences

#wyoming #transgender #non-binary #gender marker #drivers licenses

The state joins at least 7 other states that have passed drivers license gender marker bans in recent years.

Erin Reed at Erin In The Morning:

On Monday, Mississippi enrolled an anti-trans bill that will ban driver's license gender marker changes for transgender people across the state. The bill, which now awaits Republican Gov. Tate Reeves' signature, requires that all Mississippi driver's licenses reflect the holder's sex assigned at birth and explicitly states that court orders recognizing a gender change "shall have no effect" on license issuance. It is the latest in a wave of extreme anti-transgender identification document bans in recent months, following Kansas's decision in February to invalidate transgender people's driver's licenses overnight with no grace period—a story we at EITM broke. Though the Mississippi bill does not retroactively invalidate existing licenses the way Kansas did, any transgender Mississippian whose license comes up for renewal will be forced to carry identification that does not match their identity, should the governor sign it.

The bill, SB2322, is extremely broad. Alongside a requirement that all new, renewal, or duplicate driver's licenses reflect sex assigned at birth, SB 2322 also invalidates out-of-state driver's licenses issued to individuals who it asserts could not prove lawful presence in the United States—meaning that some licenses that are legal in other states are no longer recognized in Mississippi. Officials who encounter such licenses, such as during police stops, are required to cooperate with ICE. The ACLU of Mississippi, speaking in opposition to the bill, notes that the provisions "disproportionately impact both LGBTQIA+ individuals and immigrant communities by limiting access to accurate identification and expanding pathways into enforcement." In practice, the bill merges two of the current political moment's most targeted populations into a single piece of legislation.

The bill will have direct negative impacts on transgender Mississippians. In a state with strict voter ID laws, forcing a mismatch between a person’s appearance and their identification documents carries consequences. Trans people could be forcibly outed during a traffic stop, turned away at a bar, blocked at the polls, or subjected to scrutiny in any situation where a license must be produced. Notably, this is dangerous in a state where anti-LGBTQ+ animosity can be extremely high. According to the 2022 U.S. Trans Survey, which had over 92,000 participants, roughly a quarter of transgender people whose identification documents do not match their gender identity reported experiencing verbal harassment, assault, or denial of services when showing their IDs.

The bill is the latest in a growing wave of anti-transgender identification document laws. In February, Kansas went further than any state before it, invalidating transgender people's driver's licenses overnight and sending letters demanding their immediate surrender—leaving many scrambling and unable to get to work, pick up their children, and navigate daily life with suddenly invalid IDs. Though Mississippi's bill does not contain those instant revocation provisions, the effect will be the same over time: as licenses come up for renewal, transgender Mississippians will be forced to carry documents that out them. According to the Movement Advancement Project, seven states already do not allow transgender people to update the gender marker on their driver's license. If Gov. Reeves signs SB 2322, Mississippi will become the eighth.

Mississippi is set to join the dubious list of hateful and malicious erasure of trans people from using drivers’ licenses matching their gender identity.

#Mississippi #Transgender Erasure #Gender Markers #Drivers Licenses #Anti Trans Extremism #Transgender #Mississippi SB2322 #Tate Reeves

What Does Transgender Citizenship Mean after a New Kansas Law?

Isaac Sederbaum and Paisley Currah for Can We Still Govern?:

On February 18th, the Kansas legislature overrode Governor Kelly’s veto to enact Senate Bill 244. The new law has four major components that drastically affect the lives of trans Kansans.

Sex is defined as binary, immutable, and determined at birth.

As a result, the driver’s licenses and birth certificates of Kansans who had previously changed the sex marker on those documents are now invalid.

The law also requires that individuals use restrooms that correspond with their birth sex with violations carrying civil penalties of up to a $1,000.

Finally, private citizens can file lawsuits if they feel “aggrieved by” the presence of a trans person (or someone they believe to be trans) in a public restroom. In effect, it deputizes bathroom bounty hunters, much like the law passed in Odessa, Texas and a bill advancing in Idaho.

Three days before the legislation went into effect, an unsigned letter from the Division of Vehicles was mailed to hundreds of transgender Kansans informing them that driver’s licenses that do not list sex at birth are invalid effective February 26. Independent reporter Erin Reed was sent a copy of one of these letters. Gender marker changes had been allowed on driver’s licenses in Kansas since 2007 as a matter of public policy. But in 2023, the legislature passed a “Women’s Bill of Rights” that defined girls and women as those who produce ova and boys and men as those whose biological systems fertilize ova. Kris Kobach, the Attorney General, tried to apply that definition to the gender marker on driver’s licenses. A Kansas appellate court found that this statute was not clear on whether or not it applied to driver’s licenses and allowed gender marker changes to resume. SB 244 eliminated the ambiguity.

From Administrative Burden to Criminalization and Erasure

What is happening in Kansas, alongside the now-stalled SAVE Act, an example of what are sometimes described as “gendered burdens”: experiences of coercive and controlling state actions that regulate gendered bodies, labor and identity. Trans people have long faced specific administrative burdens when interacting with state agencies. As Isaac demonstrated in his dissertation, “The Cost of Being Trans: Administrative Burden, Citizen-State Interaction, and Transgender People in the US,” in the area of identity documents, trans people face multi-layered learning, compliance, and psychological costs. If your main complaint about getting identity documents is that DMV lines are too long, it’s worth unpacking all that is involved for trans people.

In 24 states, individuals must find a trans-friendly medical provider who will write a letter. In Kansas, for example, before the recent change, the letter had to attest that one underwent, “appropriate clinical treatment for change of gender” or that gender reclassification was appropriate, and file that letter with the Division of Vehicles, along with the requisite fee. To legally change their name, they would have to go before a judge, and in many states have that name change published in a newspaper.

Some states have eased these burdens; twenty-one states now allow for “self-attestation” of gender for driver’s licenses—no supporting documentation required. However, even that process can still be very expensive, on average costing at least $250. For many trans people, this is an untenable amount of money. The 2016 US Trans Survey found that 35% of individuals who wanted to update their documents had not done so because of cost.

None of this accounts for the additional burden of navigating the process: trans people must become familiar with the laws, regulations, and forms, find office locations, and take time off of work. There are also psychological stressors: anticipated stigma, stress, and negative interactions with frontline workers who can be naive at best and hostile at worst. Many survey and interview participants from Isaac’s dissertation had stories of bad interactions. When a trans woman who had medically transitioned applied for SNAP, a caseworker threatened to call the police after she presented her license with an M on it.

If administrative burdens are the costs of interacting with government to receive a service, SB 244 raises those costs to a punitive extreme. With this law, the costs of compliance have escalated dramatically: residents face penalties both for having complied with the prior law and possibly for attempting to bring their documents into conformity with the new one. The law retroactively converts prior compliance into a violation.

Individuals who carefully followed the rules in place until just last week now face criminal penalties for having the “wrong” gender marker on their identity documents. Simply driving to the Division of Vehicles to change a license back to one’s birth sex becomes “operating a vehicle without a valid credential,” a Class B misdemeanor, punishable by up to six months in jail, a $1,000 fine, and a 90-day license suspension.

More troubling, officials are required to keep a list of everyone who reverts the gender marker on the driver’s license back to their birth sex. According to an email obtained by independent journalist Marissa Kabas, Ken Selk, Driver’s Services Manager for the Kansas Department of Vehicles, instructed employees to track people complying with SB 244.

[...]

An Architecture of Surveillance and Control in a Federalist System

SB 244 didn’t pass in a vacuum. Kansas was a pioneer in this area, but since 2023 fifteen more states have passed laws mandating a statewide definition of sex. Even before Texas passed its statute last year, it had already stopped permitting changes to sex designations on driver’s licenses. Like Kansas, the Texas Department of Public Safety is keeping a list of individuals who try to change the gender marker. Even as these states deny the existence of transgender identity, they are building administrative systems to track trans people. What appears to be definitional housekeeping is, in practice, an expanding architecture of surveillance and control. Trump’s January 2025 executive order did for the federal government what Kansas had begun at the state level: mandating a uniform definition of sex across all agencies. (The executive order goes far beyond identity documents—from education to the military to prisons to medical care—but identity documents are our focus here.) These efforts have political appeal because they seem to formalize what most people already believe: that legal sex is a single, stable fact—the same on every document, in every jurisdiction, at every agency.

In Kansas, having IDs and drivers’ licenses that reflected their gender identity instead of their gender assigned at birth has become a crime, despite being previously legal.

This is due to Kansas’s trans erasure law SB244 that is also a “bathroom bill.”

#Kansas SB244 #Transgender #Anti Trans Extremism #Drivers Licenses #Gender Markers #Gender Identity #Women's Bill Of Rights #Kansas #Transgender Erasure #Executive Order 14168

Haitian TPS holders driver’s licenses, originally linked to their work permits end date, are putting people at legal risk. A local immigrati

#immigrants #haiti #haitian immigrants #temporary protected status #drivers licenses #ohio #new jersey #florida

Indiana will no longer accept court orders or medical documentations recognizing transgender residents' gender changes.

Ryan Adamczeski at The Advocate:

The Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles has quietly banned residents from changing their gender markers on state identification documents. The BMV added a small notice to its website Monday stating that it will no longer accept court orders or medical documentations recognizing transgender residents' gender changes. The rule goes into effect February 12, giving those impacted less that three days to act. "Denying people the ability to update the gender marker on their identification is not only discriminatory; it is dangerous," LGBTQ+ advocacy organization Indiana Youth Group said in a statement. "In an increasingly hostile climate, mismatched identification can expose individuals to harassment, threats, and violence. It can also create serious barriers to employment, housing, and access to essential services."

The rule had been proposed twice before, once in July and again in November, but was met with ire from Hoosiers, who submitted thousands of emails and public testimonies against it. The policy was withdrawn each time, only to be enacted this week without comment. Only three states — Florida, Tennessee, and Texas — completely prohibit residents from updating their gender markers on state IDs, according to the Movement Advancement Project. Ten other states require proof of surgery and a court order.

The Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles issues a discriminatory ban on trans residents of the Hoosier State from changing their gender markers on state identification documents. This is nothing more than a hateful act of trans erasure.

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