Transgender people in Lawrence have been swept up in the statewide confusion about enforcing anti-trans legislation that invalidates driver’s licenses with corrected gender markers.

House Substitute for Senate Bill 244 went into effect immediately after the Kansas House and Senate voted to override Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto on Wednesday, Feb. 18.

Using a “gut and go” strategy, legislators managed to wedge two major legislative shifts into the bill. SB 244 eradicates transgender people’s fundamental right to privacy when using the bathroom in a public building, while also abolishing the opportunity for trans people to change their gender markers on Kansas drivers’ licenses or identification cards.

As a result, transgender Kansans had their IDs instantly invalidated in an enforcement rollout that has been scattershot and plagued with ambiguity.

‘De-correcting’ gender markers

Just a few months ago, couple Ruby Mae Johnson and Halsey Yankey lived in Lawrence.

Now they’re immigrants in the Netherlands, where they fled to avoid state and federal persecution in America for being trans. They were originally able to drive in their new home, using valid Kansas licenses. 

Someone still monitors their mail in Lawrence, and Johnson said as soon as the KDOR letter arrived, she knew instantly what it was. This isn’t her first rodeo having her identity redacted on her identification card. As Johnson terms it, SB 180 had ‘de-corrected’ her gender marker to reflect her sex assigned at birth.

Last fall, she obtained an ID with her correct name and gender, and “now they have to flip it back and make it worse.”

“You ever notice when you sign for your driver’s license? It’s not just giving a signature. It says, ‘I attest that the above information is true and correct,’” Johnson said, reflecting on when her license was reverted. “And so as a friend of mine said, ‘Well, all you had to do was lie to the government.’”

This would be her fifth license in three years, although it isn’t clear how she’s supposed to obtain it. The letter Johnson and hundreds of other Kansans received directs people to surrender their credential to the Kansas Division of Vehicles.

“Upon surrendering the credential, you will be issued a new credential reflecting the gender identification consistent with statutory requirements,” the document reads.

People with invalidated licenses also have to pay $8 to get a new one.

“The Kansas Legislature neither allowed for a grace period for affected credentials nor did they appropriate additional funds to cover the cost of reissuing credentials, so there is an $8 fee to cover the cost of reissuance,” wrote Zachary Dennery, a spokesperson for KDOR, in an email Thursday, Feb. 26. 

Yankey and Johnson are still in the thick of immigration bureaucracy, and the practicalities of taking in a new country can get hairy without ample transportation options. Yankey said they check their driver’s license status on KDOR’s online portal every time they buckle up. She’s thankful to have access to strong public transportation, if nothing else.

“And a lot of this stuff around trans people, both the federal and the state level, follows this pattern right there,” Johnson said. “There will be a sweeping law or rule issued, but nobody will actually put a process in place that implements it.”

Harper Seldin, a lawyer with the ACLU, confirmed it’s not clear how the law will play out in communities.

“But even so, the harm has been immediate with respect to driver’s licenses and this restroom restriction,” Seldin said. “So it is both now a very dangerous set of circumstances for people who are trans in Kansas, and then also even more dangerous because of the uncertainty.”

Seldin is one of 12 attorneys who filed a case on behalf of two trans men in Lawrence to challenge SB 244.

Douglas County District Judge James McCabria will preside over a hearing Friday, March 6, to decide whether he will delay enforcement of the law as the case proceeds.

Seldin said the plaintiffs and attorneys hope trans people can keep their licenses and ID cards and that the judge will strike down criminal restrictions on restrooms.

“(It is) dangerous to force people to out themselves as trans every time they want to use their driver’s license to apply for a job or apply for an apartment,” Seldin said.

SB 244 pushes some trans folks even further from an administrative acknowledgement they never had.

Per the Movement Advancement Project, 22 states in America have M, F and X gender marker options for drivers licenses. X’s may be used by nonbinary and gender-nonconforming individuals. Kansas has never had an X option, and it’s certainly not trending that way now.

A nonbinary member of the Trans Lawrence Coalition (TLC), who asked to remain anonymous for safety concerns, said they’re of two minds about their identification. Their own documents are affected by SB 244.

“My lived experience is the one that I care about,” they said. “And as a nonbinary person, any documentation that I have is not going to faithfully capture who I am.”

They said gender markers on licenses are impossibly small from a bureaucratic angle, but have a dramatic and overreaching effect for individual people.

“I don’t understand what harm there is in allowing someone to have a document that allows them to travel through the world with a little more safety, in a world that’s already so chaotic and divided and uncertain,” they said. “I don’t understand whom this benefits, and why so many resources and so much litigation and discourse have been dedicated to perpetuating this kind of harm.”

On the ground in Lawrence

KDOR has said around 1,700 licenses are affected by SB 244 throughout the state. As of Thursday afternoon, Denney said around 275 people received letters and 138 people have gotten an updated credential.

However, Denney said that SB 244 effectively invalidates licenses immediately, whether or not they’ve managed to make an update in the system.

Last week, independent journalist Marisa Kabas obtained internal emails from Kent Selk, driver services manager for KDOR, sent last week. One memo instructed employees to update the drivers license help desk any time somebody updates their license related to SB 244 by sharing the person’s K# and name.

“Regarding the memo, the direction for employees to email the helpdesk is part of KDOR’s process to ensure accurate information within the system,” Denney wrote via email on Thursday.

Still, trans people expressed concern over being put on a list.

Denney also said that the status on KDOR’s Driver’s License Status Check page is what law enforcement will also see if they check an ID. Credentials officially invalidated in KDOR’s system will appear as “invalid” for local police officers.

Laura McCabe, a spokesperson for the Lawrence Police Department, said the department isn’t making any policy updates at this time.

“Our response will be determined by how the state moves forward in implementation,” she said.

McCabe also said that an officer could issue a warning or citation for an invalid license, but it would be up to their discretion and depend on the reason from the stop. If they issue a citation, it would then depend on the municipal court’s appetite for litigating on invalid licenses.

Erinn Barcomb-Peterson, a spokesperson for the University of Kansas, said KUPD is in a similar limbo. 

“(The} KU Police Department is reviewing this very recent change in state statute and will evaluate any future guidance that comes from the state,” she said via email.

Johnson remembers the first time she went to the DMV. The woman behind the counter said updating gender markers was her favorite thing she got to do at work.

Now, Johnson pictures KDOR employees working entry-by-entry to evaluate and invalidate licenses.

“That’s the thing about a dehumanizing autocracy, is it doesn’t just dehumanize the targets,” she said. “It dehumanizes the people in it, and who work in it: the people whose jobs it is to be the bits of the machine that implement the persecution.”

Wulfe Wulfemeyer (they/them), reporter and news editor, has worked with The Lawrence Times since May 2025. They can be reached at wulfe@lawrencekstimes.com.

Read their complete bio here. Read their work for the Times here.

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