Kansas threatens to jail trans people who don’t surrender ID cards

Transgender people in Kansas have allegedly been threatened with jail time if they don’t surrender their driving licences after the state implements its anti-trans ID laws.

Letters handed to residents demand that any and all government-issued driving licences and ID cards be returned once the red state’s new anti-trans law takes effect.

The sweeping anti-trans bill, SB244, bans trans and non-binary Kansans from using public toilets and locker rooms consistent with their gender identity. It also allows citizens to submit bounty-style lawsuits against anyone they spot in facilities which they believe are transgender.

Republican lawmakers forcefully passed the legislation despite the state’s governor, Laura Kelly, vetoing it earlier this month after describing it as “poorly drafted”.

According to a report from independent journalist Erin Reed, the Kansas Department of Revenue then submitted letters to relevant individuals instructing them to surrender any ID cards that did not “match your sex assigned at birth”.

Those who surrendered their identification cards will then receive replacements that, the Department writes, will meet the “statutory requirements” of SB244.

Residents who do not comply could face a class B misdemeanour, which carries a $1,000 fine and up to six months in jail. Those who received a letter are able to appeal the notice, but only if it has been sent “in error”.

“We apologise for the inconvenience this causes you,” the letter reads.

Governor Kelly argued in her veto announcement that the legislation went “far beyond the intent to limit the right for trans people to use the appropriate bathroom.”

She said the law would have dire consequences for all Kansans and would prevent husbands from seeing their wives in shared hospital rooms or granddaughters from seeing their grandfather in shared nursing homes.

Numerous similar bills across the US have resulted in multiple people, cisgender and transgender, being wrongfully confronted or abused for using public bathrooms.

In August last year, Minnesota teenager Gerika Mudra, a cisgender lesbian, said she was forced to expose her breasts to a woman in the bathroom of a Buffalo Wild Wings after she was accused of being “a man”.

The 18-year-old filed a discrimination lawsuit against the restaurant chain after a staff member began banging on the door of a toilet stall which she was occupying, yelling that the “man needs to get out of here”.

Similar cases have emerged in the UK, with a report in the same month highlighting multiple accounts of cisgender and transgender people being harassed or confronted for using public facilities.

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