Kansas is going to change gender markers on trans people’s IDs back to their sex assigned at birth

Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach (R) announced Monday that the state will change the gender marker on transgender people’s birth certificates and driver’s licenses back to the gender marker that corresponds to their sex assigned at birth.

Kobach made the announcement Monday as part of his office’s formal legal guidance on enforcing S.B. 180, a sweeping new anti-trans law passed in April and set to take effect on July 1, according to NBC News.

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Devastated plaintiffs argued that the policy forces trans people “to out themselves.”

As KMUW notes, transgender Kansans have been able to change the gender markers on their birth certificates and driver’s licenses since 2019, when the state agreed to a consent decree settling a 2018 lawsuit brought by four transgender residents who claimed that the state’s refusal to correct birth certificates violated their constitutional right to equal protection.

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Last Friday, Kobach filed a motion asking a federal judge to end that consent decree.

“If you were a person who transitioned and got a birth certificate reflecting a different sex, that piece of paper can remain with you,” Kobach said at a news conference on Monday. “There’s nothing in the law that forces someone to surrender a certificate that was changed. However, the state’s data will reflect the original sex at birth.”

Lambda Legal counsel and health care strategist Omar Gonzalez-Pagan said the organization would fight Kobach’s effort to end the consent decree. “S.B. 180, while misguided and discriminatory, does not conflict with the Consent Judgment,” Gonzalez-Pagan said in a statement. “Lambda Legal will not allow the Attorney General to nullify a binding, years-old federal judgment.”

Prior to Kobach’s announcement, legal experts had assumed that the state would not move to change gender markers that had already been updated under the 2019 consent decree. KMUW reports that hundreds of transgender people in the state rushed to update their documents before S.B. 180 was scheduled to take effect.  

S.B. 180 has been characterized as a “women’s bill of rights” by Republican supporters who claim it is necessary to keep transgender women and girls out of women’s restrooms and locker rooms. In addition to legally defining “sex” in terms of reproductive biology, the law also bans trans people from accessing facilities that correspond with their gender identity in schools, prisons, women’s shelters, rape crisis shelters, and locker rooms, and bans trans people from updating the gender marker on their birth certificates and driver’s licenses.

But as NBC News notes, the law—which does not change any criminal statutes, mandate any criminal penalties or fines, or allow people to sue others for alleged violations—lacks clear enforcement mechanisms.

American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas executive director Micah Kubic told KMUW that S.B. 180 does not require the measures Kobach announced on Monday. “These are of his own volition and interpretation, driven by his own extreme ideological perspective, not by requirements of the law, the constitution, or the best interests of Kansans,” Kubic said.

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