TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Adam Kellogg was a self-described nerdy 16-year-old preparing to board a flight from Kansas City to Florida for a space and science camp trip to Cape Canaveral when security held him up for 30 minutes because his driver’s license identified him as female.
Three years later, the University of Kansas student’s driver’s license identifies him as male, but legislative proposals in at least eight states could prevent transgender people like him from changing their driver’s licenses and birth certificates. The Republican-controlled Kansas Legislature is considering a bill that would define male and female in state law and base people’s legal gender identities on their anatomy at birth.
Nationally, conservatives are pushing dozens of proposals in statehouses to restrict transgender athletes, transgender surgeries and drag shows. But in measures like Kansas’, LGBTQ-rights advocates see a new, sweeping effort to erase trans people’s legal existence, deny recognition to nonbinary or gender-fluid people and ignore those who are intersex — people born with genitalia, reproductive organs, chromosomes and/or hormone levels that don’t fit typical definitions for male or female.
“Something that’s really important for me is being able to just simply exist as a man, not even think about it,” Kellogg said this week while visiting the Statehouse with other transgender people and LGBTQ advocates.
Kellogg laughs now about his experience at the airport, but it was no laughing matter at the time. Back then, he bound the breasts that he’d later have surgically removed and, “They thought I had a bomb strapped to me.”