March 13 (UPI) -- A new state law in Kansas has invalidated the driver's licenses and other government-issued documents of transgender residents.
No law has ever retroactively invalidated legally-obtained documents requiring people to immediately change those documents. Four other states prohibit changing gender markers on licenses for trans people but they do not retroactively invalidate licenses.
The first-of-its-kind law, Senate Bill 244, orders that the gender marked on one's driver's license must match the state's binary definition of the male and female sexes. It also orders the state registrar to "correct" birth certificate records that do not reflect these definitions.
The invalidation of a driver's license is not only an issue of mobility on the road. Driver's licenses are also a common form of identity verification. The Kansas law poses the risk of outing transgender people by forcing them to disclose their status when applying for a job, renting a living space, opening a bank account or verifying their identity in online spaces.
"It violates the constitutional rights of transgender Kansans by depriving them of the right to control their informational privacy, their right to equality and their constitutional right to free expression," Sasha Buchert, senior attorney at Lambda Legal and director of the Non-Binary and Transgender Rights Project, told UPI.
