Kansas Secretly Spent Years Making a List of Trans Residents. Today, the State is Taking Their IDs.

An investigation from Transitics has revealed that, under a Democratic governor, Kansas built a list of the state's trans people. Now, Republicans are weaponizing it to revoke their IDs.

The Kansas State Capitol in Topeka | Image: Wikimedia Commons

Yesterday, it was reported that the state of Kansas has been sending letters to trans residents informing them that their IDs will be revoked in less than 24 hours, upon the effective date of the extreme anti-trans law SB 244. The law, which passed last week following a Republican override of the governor’s veto, forces the state to invalidate all driver’s licenses and birth certificates that don’t display the holder’s sex assigned at birth.

Of course, this will have devastating consequences: in Kansas, driving without a valid license is considered a class B misdemeanor and carries penalties of up to 6 months in jail and a $1,000 fine. As a result, the ~1,700 people these revocations are affecting will have no choice but to surrender their current licenses, pay for the replacement, and wait up to 6 weeks to receive the new one.

Other states have tried something similar in the past. In late 2022, it was revealed that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton had attempted to make a list of every person who had changed their driver’s license gender marker over the previous two years. And in this instance, while the state was able to produce a figure for the number of times a gender marker had been changed on a license, it found that it did not have the funding to determine which changes were due to a clerical error and which were due to the holder’s gender identity.

Even still, in 2024, the state did end up banning gender marker updates and began reverting the licenses of trans Texans upon renewal. But because funds were never set aside to create Paxton’s list, for the past year and a half, DMV employees have had to manually check everyone’s driver records in order to carry out the policy. The state has additionally been making a list of trans people who have asked about changing their licenses.

In Florida, it was a similar story. The same year as Texas, the state also banned trans residents from updating their IDs. There, the restrictions were less airtight, and as such, Florida resorted to periodically reviewing driver records to ensure licenses displayed the holder’s sex assigned at birth. This has resulted in there being at least three documented incidents of the state revoking trans people’s recently issued driver’s licenses due to “improper changes.”

In both of these cases, while anti-trans policies were implemented, the states lacked the funds needed to compile a list of trans people’s licenses. As a result, these restrictions—as well as Texas’ list-making directive—could not be enforced retroactively.

It goes without saying that it’s simply not possible for Kansas to have searched through every driver’s license in the state in the 5 days between when the law was passed and when it sent out the letters. Quite glaringly, the state legislature didn’t even give them the funds to do so.

But it didn’t need to.

Because Kansas already had the data.

As it turns out, unlike other states that have restricted trans people’s documents, an investigation by Transitics has revealed that Kansas has been quietly collecting and storing information on trans people for at least the better part of a decade.

First, there’s the Office of Vital Statistics. Back in 2019, the state began allowing trans people to update their birth certificates following a lawsuit settlement. These changes were entirely administrative: all Kansans had to do was present an updated ID or a statement from a medical professional confirming their gender identity. The OVS would then review the evidence and issue a new certificate that showed no trace of being amended—or at least that should’ve been the case.

Instead, the OVS decided to internally flag trans people’s amendments.

Speaking to those familiar with the vital records system, Transitics has learned that, since 2019, trans people’s birth certificates have been very visibly marked within the system itself. And most importantly, the label used for trans people is separate from the label used for amendments due to clerical error.

When the state legislature banned gender marker changes in 2023 and mandated that any certificates issued after its effective date display the person’s sex assigned at birth, state employees were able to quickly determine which certificates it needed to revert.

Furthermore, because the system can also search for all the birth certificates marked with this trans-specific flag, the state was instantly able to generate a list of the ~1,800 people whose certificates it needs to invalidate under SB 244. In virtually all other states, this would’ve, at minimum, required a manual review of all gender marker amendments performed during that 4-year window—an expensive process that legislatures are reluctant to fund.

The law’s fiscal note confirms this. There, the agency explicitly states that costs will only arise out of a need to review the previously issued birth certificates—the physical certificates themselves, which the agency maintains a record of—it needs to invalidate. And it also implies that it knows precisely how many records it will need to search through, estimating that doing this will cost exactly $7,309.

And it wasn’t just the OVS, either. Representatives for the Division of Vehicles confirmed that, since legalizing driver’s license updates in 2007, the DOV has also tracked trans people.

Like the OVS, the DOV created an internal marker that is specific to the process Kansas called “gender reclassification.” Similar to the vital records system, this trans-specific flag gives the DOV the ability to quickly create a list of trans people—an ability it recently utilized to send the revocation letters.

Again turning to the fiscal note, the state’s tracking of trans people is even more blatant than before. Here, the agency claims that, unless it’s made to shoulder the costs of reissuance, the revocations will cost $3,390, spent purely on developing internal guidance and designing and mailing the letters. The DOV doesn’t even need to review anything because it already knows.

It’s always known.

Most egregiously, Kansas didn’t have to flag trans people’s documents in the first place—after all, this is something not even Florida and Texas did prior to the implementation of their anti-trans policies. Both the OVS and DOV are controlled by Kansas’ Democratic governor—Laura Kelly—and therefore had zero reason to facilitate the implementation of Republicans’ anti-trans policies. Especially not to this degree.

After winning the lawsuit over gender markers on driver’s licenses in October of last year, the state should’ve seen the writing on the wall and merged all gender marker changes—whether trans or not—into a single label, forcing a lengthy and costly manual review. At the very least, it should’ve stopped using the “gender reclassification” label for trans people’s changes and employed a neutral label. But it didn’t.

Because of this inaction, 1,700 trans Kansans have had their driver’s licenses revoked overnight. Those that haven’t received a letter yet may be unknowingly driving with an invalid license, an offense that could land them in jail. Some may lose their travel plans. Others who drive for a living will be unable to do their jobs until their new licenses arrive. All for being trans.

Laura Kelly could’ve made this hurt Republicans. She could’ve made this extreme policy more politically harmful by raising its fiscal cost. Instead, it’s only hurting trans people. That’s unacceptable.