Excerpts:
On Feb. 25, Siobhan Kirchstein received an official letter from the Kansas Division of Vehicles instructing her to surrender her driver’s license. She was one of hundreds of Kansans who received such letters when Senate Bill 244, a hastily passed piece of legislation, invalidated driver’s licenses on which the gender marker did not match the holder’s sex as assigned at birth.
“Additionally, please note that the Legislature did not include a grace period for updating credentials,” the letter said. “This means that once the law is officially enacted, your current credential will be invalid immediately.” The law was going into effect the next day.
Kirchstein, who is 41, had transitioned in 2023. She had changed her legal name and her gender marker in the Social Security system, on her passport card and on her Kansas driver’s license. It required jumping through a lot of bureaucratic hoops — the name change alone required a court hearing and proof that Kirchstein had notified her bank, credit card company, landlord and others — but it was worth it, to make it official.
“We apologize for the inconvenience this causes you,” the letter said.
Some of the words or expressions in this article may at first blush seem hyperbolic. One of them is “fascism.” That’s how Kirschstein characterized the process when we met in Lawrence, Kan., in July: “It was soft fascism.” It was. Fascism usually begins with redefining the nation by excluding certain groups, which are branded threats to national health and unity. The Trump administration has fixated on two groups most of all — immigrants and trans people — in just this way, smearing us (I am a member of both groups) as predatory, sick, at once subhuman and terrifyingly powerful.
With the possible exception of Lawrence (and even Lawrence is a stretch), Kansas is a place where a person cannot survive without a car — can’t go to work, can’t shop for groceries, never mind see friends or go to a movie.
Which brings me back to the word “fascism.” In 1938, Nazi Germany passed a law requiring Jews to add a specific middle name to their identity documents — Israel for men, Sara for women — so that they could be easily identifiable.
A study by the Williams Institute found that about 21 percent of trans Americans have served in the armed forces, more than double the national average. In Perdue’s age group, the percentage may be even higher. She signed up for the Army right out of college, in 2016, soon after President Barack Obama’s administration announced a new policy allowing transgender troops to serve openly and to get gender-affirming care. She was out to all her friends but had not transitioned medically. The recruiter advised enlisting as a man and coming out once she was already in the service. The military had guidelines, an established process for transitioning troops, and this process could require one to stay in one place for a year or more. Perdue decided to wait until after basic training, then until after officer school, then until after her first deployment — and then it was March 2019, she was in the woods in Poland, scrolling through Reddit, and she learned that the Pentagon was going to make good on President Trump’s 2017 promise to ban trans troops.
Lieutenant Perdue had less than a month before the new policy went into effect. She got her official diagnosis of “gender dysphoria” just two days before the deadline. She started hormones in March 2021. But, she told me, “I’d seen the writing on the wall.” Yes, Joe Biden was by then president and things might change again (they did), but then they could change right back (they have). Perdue decided to get out of the military while she was still young enough to start a civilian career.
She moved to Manhattan, Kan., and enrolled in Kansas State University’s aviation program. In February 2025 she received her certification as a flight instructor.
Perdue changed her name and the gender marker on all her documents in 2022. In 2023, the Kansas Legislature passed Senate Bill 180, which backers called the “women’s bill of rights.” It defined sex as biological and binary and decreed that “‘female’ is an individual whose biological reproductive system is developed to produce ova, and a ‘male’ is an individual whose biological reproductive system is developed to fertilize the ova of a female.” The Democratic governor of Kansas, Laura Kelly, vetoed the bill. The Legislature overrode the veto.
Perdue didn’t think the new law would affect her — it seemed like a symbolic pronouncement. Then the state’s attorney general, Kris Kobach, a longtime Trump ally, sued to bar state agencies from allowing the use of gender markers different from the sex people were assigned at birth. He claimed that he was trying to enforce S.B. 180. A court temporarily granted his request. Perdue, meanwhile, moved into a new house and excitedly sent away for a driver’s license with the new address. The license came back with the gender marker “M.”
In 2025, a state appeals court reversed the lower court’s decision. Perdue went back to the Division of Vehicles and got a license with the marker “F,” as on all her other ID cards. Less than a year later, the Legislature passed S.B. 244. Perdue got what trans Kansans refer to as the Letter — the same one Kirchstein got, informing her that her driver’s license would expire by the end of the day. It was 2:30 in the afternoon when she took the envelope out of her mailbox. She thought it was lucky that she had the day off — she got her new/old driver’s license with the “M” marker before close of business.
Baney, who grew up with her mother in Nebraska, was around 13 when she was caught in the girls’ locker room trying on someone’s clothes. Things at home got tense enough that she ended up moving to Kansas to live with her father, a Trump-voting, immigrant-hating, gun-toting man, and he became the center of her world. She enlisted and, as a gift from her father, got a large tattoo of a bald eagle wrapped in an American flag with dog tags around its neck; the low-cut dress she wore to her name-change hearing exposed most of it. After her father died four years ago, Baney started therapy, began identifying as trans and bisexual, and began her medical transition. Now she says she is the happiest she has been in her adult life. She has found a community in Lawrence. She has a boyfriend who works as a custodian at the same large manufacturing plant where she works in maintenance; they take lunch together. It’s hard to square that happiness — and that name-change hearing — with the new anti-trans law and the fear it has generated. “I have whiplash,” she told me.
I had whiplash, too. It’s as if there are two Kansases — one of them a kind, loving Kansas where neighbors accept one another and churches offer sanctuary to immigrants and create summer camps for queer kids.
And then there is Kris Kobach’s Kansas. Kobach’s website boasts that he brought the first case against the Obama administration over Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, representing Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents seeking broader powers to detain and deport. He sued the Biden administration repeatedly and challenged vaccine mandates in court. Kobach served as Kansas’ secretary of state from 2011 to 2019, and in that time he instituted some of the strictest voter ID regulations in the country. During the first Trump administration, he served as vice chair of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, an early institutional effort to sow doubt about the integrity of our elections. As attorney general, he has pursued a policy agenda as closely aligned with Trump’s as any in the country. Anti-trans legislation has been a centerpiece.
The State Capitol is one of a few major tourist attractions in Topeka. Another is the Westboro Baptist Church, infamous for spewing hate against gays, trans people, Jews, soldiers and many other groups, and for winning a 2011 Supreme Court case that secured its right to do so in audacious ways. The church displays hate messages in rotation on a giant marquee. (I won’t quote them, but if you hover over this phrase, you’ll see the URL the church uses.) Two houses stand across the street from the church, one painted the rainbow colors of the L.G.B.T.Q. flag, the other pink, white and blue, the colors of the trans flag. Two visions of Kansas, silently facing off day after day.
Fascism works not only by the passage of arbitrary, dehumanizing laws but also by the arbitrary, dehumanizing enforcement of the laws. Only about 1,700 people have received the Letter; this is certainly only a small fraction of Kansans who have changed their gender marker. Several people who have not yet received it — including Abi Boatman, the legislator — told me that they regularly checked the state website to see if their old license still came up as valid. If so, is it safe to drive with it? The license is still illegal under the law. Mogoi, who runs the clinic in Wichita, told me that some of her trans patients have received the Letter three times while most haven’t received it once; some who tried to update their driver’s licenses without the Letter weren’t able to.
I have written about many displaced people in different parts of the world. One thing I’ve learned is that the people who leave first are usually those who have resources, those who have connections elsewhere, those who have traveled. Generally speaking, these are not the people who are hit hardest by whatever disaster they are escaping. In Kansas, for example, it’s the working-class people who have jobs that require a driver’s license, the people whose bathroom breaks are timed, the people who can’t afford to pay a fine if they are issued a citation who are likely to feel the effects of S.B. 244 most acutely.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/13/opinion/kansas-anti-trans-laws-drivers-license.html