Kansas’ latest “bathroom bill” is sending a message to transgender people: You have overstayed your welcome. Some folks in Lawrence are on their way out.
“I don’t feel like I’ll ever be safe in Kansas at this point. And I do not feel like this is a place where I belong. I do not feel like this is a place where I can grow and flourish and be me,” said Kansas Campbell, a Black trans woman and drag artist. “But then again, where else in the United States can I go right now that is going to fully affirm me?”
Since Senate Bill 244 was passed in February, Campbell said she’s felt the winds around Lawrence change.
The bill forces trans people to use bathrooms that align with their sex assigned at birth as opposed to their gender identity. It also bars people from changing their gender markers on their state-issued documents, like driver’s licenses, while reverting any changes that have been made in the past.
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The American Civil Liberties Union and Ballard Spahr LLP filed a case on behalf of two trans men in Lawrence in February to challenge the law. In March, Douglas County District Judge James McCabria denied plaintiffs’ request to temporarily halt the legislation while the lawsuit plays out.
He pushed the next hearing in the case to Sept. 29, and now Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach wants to consolidate the case with a separate case from a trans woman challenging Kansas’ restriction on preferred gender markers on driver’s licenses.
In his memorandum decision, McCabria wrote that the state, represented by Kobach, didn’t prove that the law protected Kansans. He also wrote that the plaintiffs’ attorneys didn’t prove the law could harm trans Kansans.
“In hearing the arguments of each side, the Court is struck by a basic assumption each side makes about the other that our ‘lesser angels’ drive our choices,” McCabria wrote. “Yet, the very paucity of actual examples that either side has put forward in any of the arguments suggests the opposite — that the vast majority of Kansans are tolerant, understanding, accepting and generally supportive of each other and that the vast majority of transgender persons have experienced this as Kansans.”
Sylvie Althoff, a public school teacher and trans woman living in Lawrence, called the decision galling.
“I think the onus is on the government to prove that if it’s going to infringe on our fundamental rights to exist in public life, they need to demonstrate, they need to provide proof of why using state power to harm us is necessary. And they have not done that,” she said. “Waiting until we are harmed by a law to strike that law down as harmful is asinine … it’s not how human rights work.”
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Certainly, not every trans person in Lawrence is packing their bags, and not every cisgender Kansan wants to see their neighbors leave. But whether or not trans Kansans can produce examples of harm that satisfy a county judge, some people are considering a hasty exit rather than courting potential disaster.
Althoff and her wife are planning to flee Kansas in 2027. Leaving any sooner, she said, would deplete their emergency savings.
“Every morning we wake up and hope that things won’t get any harder for us to live our lives in Kansas,” she said. “It’s exhausting, having to live in a constant state of fear that our government will choose to make our lives worse because of immutable aspects of our identities.”
‘We’re already policed in everything that we do’
“I’ve lived in Lawrence for 13 years, and I have never, ever been scared to walk down the street,” Campbell said.
But for the first time this spring, she was walking when someone in a passing car called her an anti-Black slur and an anti-trans slur, she said. The person also called her lazy. She was on her way to work.
Campbell hosts a monthly show once called The Dollhaus that platforms Black, trans performers. She’s rebranded it to “The Drag Show” to hopefully divert any unwanted attention.
“I am rearranging it because I’m scared. I’m scared there’s going to be a day where somebody might walk in and try to harm us,” she said. “We’ve never had an instance like that in Lawrence, but of all places, it makes sense that it would happen.”
In April, she said attendance had generally dropped at drag shows, which can be a major source of income to her and other performers. Attendance has always been middling at The Drag Show, however.
“This community does not like anything that centers black trans lives and they do their damnedest to show that they would rather show up for white centered shows and that’s just it,” she wrote via message in June.
SB 244 serves to ramp up the stakes for her Black, trans community.
“We’re already policed in everything that we do, and so this is just one more thing to add fuel to the fire,” Campbell said. “And I can’t really explain that, I just, it’s something that I know and feel in my heart. It’s something that I know, that as a Black trans woman, I now have to be super vigilant, just about everything I do.”
Campbell said the bill pushes trans people to try and appear as cisgender as possible, either to align with their gender identity or their sex assigned at birth.
“We know there are multiple genders, but we have to literally choose between, ‘Do I want to be male today or female-presenting?’ And that is mind-boggling to people who are sitting here having to already go through the stress of transition. Like, you’re telling me I have to go back to doing what was killing me? That’s not right,” she said.
Raine Toxtle Flores-Peña, Nahua, is a transmasculine Native guy. Like Campbell, he expects that Black, Brown and Indigenous folks will be put under a uniquely intense magnifying glass.
“That already has been happening in the background for, you know, a bajillion years since colonialism,” he said, especially to those trans folks who don’t conform to white, European beauty standards.
He continued, saying “I think there’s more wiggle room with white transgender folks to be ‘gender-zany’ … People of color tend to be more scrutinized.”
Flores-Peña said he understood why many trans people still want to stay in Kansas: they’ve made their homes here. But he plans to move somewhere that has more support for his community on the state level. The only thing preventing him, at this point, are his medical needs and finances.
“I feel like most people move for, ‘Oh, like I want to get this type of education,’ you know, jobs and stuff,’” he said. “It’s like, ‘No, I don’t really want to be hate-crimed here.’”
‘The calls are coming from inside the house, buddy’
This isn’t the first time Kansas legislation has shifted trans lives and pushed neighbors away.
Shortly after speaking at Lawrence’s Transgender Day of Remembrance event in November, Ruby Mae Johnson and Halsey Yankey left not just Lawrence, but the country. The two trans women fled to avoid state and federal persecution in America for being trans. They both left knowing they may never see members of their family again.
In 2023, Ley Schneider wrote a Letter to the Times entitled “Loving Kansas from afar.” Schneider, a trans man who had been a lifelong Kansas resident, wrote about deciding to leave the state. Legislators had passed Senate Bill 180, which purported to define a person’s “sex” as “biological sex, either male or female, at birth.”
“Our state legislature has made it very clear how they feel about people like me, especially lately,” Schneider wrote in 2023. “To these representatives, I am not a valuable enough member of our community to self-determine my identity … To these representatives, my ‘American Dream’ stops at their opinions about a community I would hazard a guess they have never met or interacted with.”
Since he took pen to paper for his letter, Schneider has lived in Chicago and Los Angeles. In June, Schneider said he left only partly because he was curious to explore living in different places.
“This larger, more insidious part of it was seeing the writing on the wall,” he said.
Schneider contemplated the outlines of a Kansas future. He wanted to safely and comfortably get married and have children. He couldn’t stomach the thought of losing his future kids if Kansas were to decide he’s an unsuitable parent because he’s trans.
“I don’t want to be trying to help my kid go to the restroom and, like, somebody calls the cops on their dad for going to the bathroom,” he said.
When Schneider lived in Lawrence, he worked at an all-gender shelter. Now, he works in social services attuned to queer people in California.
“I am a Kansan. I grew up there,” he said. “… That makes me sad, too, because, if it were a less hostile place to live, maybe I would want to move back to Lawrence and take the social work knowledge that I gained from other places and bring that back to the community there.”
Althoff grappled with a similar guilt. She is an elementary school teacher in the Lawrence school district. This year, she was rated a distinguished level teacher by her supervisor.
“I like living in Lawrence. I like being in Kansas,” she said. “I want to contribute my labors to this community, to the friends and colleagues and my neighbors, everybody I know around here. I want to spend my life contributing to this community, but I don’t think I can safely anymore.”
She said that SB 244, which aims to erase trans people from public life, only forced her to become more visible at work. She had to come out to colleagues as she asked for time off to go to the DMV or for rides to work.
“The thought that my presence at my workplace is somehow a threat to the women I work with or to my students is disgusting and offensive,” she added. “Kansas can’t afford to drive away teachers right now.”
Althoff said folks shouldn’t be surprised about why Kansas’ population isn’t growing.
“Buddy, the calls are coming from inside the house,” she said. “This is why people are leaving. People don’t want to live in a state that does this.”
‘Will City Hall one day give in?’
Siobhan Kirchstein, secretary of Lawrence PRIDE, stood before the city commission on June 2 to usher in Pride Month with an annual proclamation.
“Let us strive to only support Pride celebrations and local organizations that are dedicated to the full equality and safety of our trans community,” she said to commissioners and the gathered audience. “We at Lawrence PRIDE appreciate knowing that we can count on the city to be an ally in this fight.”
At the same time, Kirchstein is wondering if safety measures will be stripped away.
“I’m in Lawrence where there’s ordinances that protect me, but who knows how long that those ordinances will last?” she asked in March. “Will City Hall one day give in to the (anti-) DEI initiatives and get rid of all those ordinances? Will I have to move away from Lawrence?”
In response to questions about SB 244 in March, a city spokesperson said staff would need to review facilities and procedures to comply with the law. This week, the city attorney’s office said their review was concluded.
“We have followed the recommendations of the Kansas League of Municipalities on the legislation,” the email reads. “We have confirmed that our multiple private spaces in city buildings have the appropriate signage. Staff are aware of the new law and the City is in compliance with it.”
The office said the city has not repealed Ordinance 9999, a safe haven law to create more protections for transgender and gender-nonconforming people.
When asked how SB 244 would impact the ordinance, and vice versa, the city said, “That ordinance focused primarily on SB 180 passed in 2023. It is read in conjunction with later legislation, including SB 244.”
‘I am ready to throw that brick’
Trans joy may be nebulous and difficult to grasp in the face of SB 244, but it doesn’t vanish altogether when threatened.
“Trans joy is just being who I am every single day, no matter what anyone says,” Kirchstein said.
She had made a decision the day before her interview to start hormone replacement therapy again “knowing that it might be taken away from me.”
Flores-Peña, Kirchstein and Campbell all said now is the time for allies to make a stand or contribute mutual aid funds to their transgender neighbors.
Flores-Peña doesn’t want to see the lives of Black and Brown trans people exclusively reduced to sob stories around challenging legislation. Instead, he’s taking solace in stories of trans ancestors and folks around the world who have built networks of support and resistance, like Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera and Osh-Tisch.
Althoff is staying rooted in her art. She has placed story after story in science fiction publications. You can read her work here.
Campbell is taking a performance hiatus, but folks can stay in the loop on her Instagram.
“At the end of the day, a piece of paper does not define me,” she wrote. “I know who I am and … I’m gonna use whatever bathroom I’m most comfortable using because I’m a woman. At any moment, I am ready to throw that brick.”
Note: Information about consolidating court cases in this article has been corrected.
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Wulfe Wulfemeyer (they/them), reporter and news editor, has worked with The Lawrence Times since May 2025. They can be reached at [email protected].
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