By JOHN HANNA
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Two transgender males are suing Kansas over a brand new regulation that invalidated their driver’s licenses and about 1,700 others for reflecting folks’s gender identities and never their intercourse assigned at delivery, arguing that the measure is “dehumanizing.”
The boys filed their case Thursday, the identical day the regulation took impact, and argue that it violates rights to privateness, private autonomy and due authorized course of assured by the Kansas Structure. The boys are also difficult the regulation’s robust, new enforcement provisions for the state’s 3-year-old coverage of barring transgender folks from utilizing public restrooms or different single-sex amenities related to their gender identities.
The boys need to block the regulation, which additionally invalidated roughly 1,800 transgender folks’s delivery certificates. They filed their case in district court docket in Douglas County, the place they reside, which is dwelling to the principle College of Kansas campus and is a liberal bastion in a red-leaning state.
“The Kansas Structure prohibits the Kansas Legislature’s concentrating on of transgender people for this discriminatory and dehumanizing therapy,” the lawsuit says.
The state Supreme Court docket declared in 2019 that the Kansas Invoice of Rights confers and protects a proper to bodily autonomy — a choice that protected abortion rights.
The brand new regulation was enacted final week when Republicans, who maintain a supermajority within the Legislature, overrode a veto by Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly. The decide dealing with the lawsuit, James McCabria, was appointed to the bench in 2014 by Republican Gov. Sam Brownback, and Douglas County residents have voted 3 times since to maintain him on the bench.
A 2023 state regulation, additionally enacted over Kelly’s veto, outlined female and male by an individual’s “organic reproductive system” at delivery. The Kansas Supreme Court docket hasn’t but reviewed it.
This 12 months’s regulation requires stiff fines for cities, counties, public faculties and state businesses that don’t prohibit transgender folks’s use of amenities, in addition to fines and felony prosecutions for transgender individuals who violate it. Folks can also sue trans people over alleged violations.
Republican legislators argued that the brand new regulation will defend women and girls and sometimes described transgender ladies and women as male.
“Kansans count on readability, not confusion,” Home Speaker Dan Hawkins, a Wichita Republican, stated after the regulation was enacted. “They count on management, not give up to radical activists.”
The regulation bars any “intercourse” itemizing on driver’s licenses and delivery certificates apart from the one assigned at delivery and invalidates present data that don’t comply. The state has began notifying transgender folks by mail that their licenses are invalid and so they should get new ones instantly.
Not less than eight different states don’t enable transgender folks to vary one or each paperwork, however solely Kansas has invalidated paperwork that have been beforehand modified.
The 2 males suing over the brand new regulation are from Lawrence, about 40 miles west of Kansas Metropolis, and represented by American Civil Liberties Union attorneys. They’re recognized as Daniel Doe and Matthew Moe, saying they worry discrimination, harassment and violence in the event that they don’t stay nameless.
