What’s the difference between a 15-year-old and a transgender adult? The 15-year-old can drive legally in Kansas.
It sounds like a joke, but it’s a cruel reality. As of Feb. 26, Kansas has invalidated the driver’s licenses of the approximately 1,700 trans Kansans whose licenses reflected their gender rather than their birth-assigned sex. Unlike states that never allowed changes to gender markers, Kansas’ move is a striking reversal of its prior permissive policy. This law, one of hundreds of pieces of anti-trans legislation across the country, senselessly targets the small minority of people who happen to be trans.
This wave of legislation follows previously enacted “bathroom bills” that barred trans individuals’ access to public restrooms matching their gender identity — a fight that now awaits judicial resolution. In 2026, lawmakers have raised the stakes to invalidate trans people’s identity documents. These laws make anyone who’s even a little gender nonconforming an object of suspicion, a potential criminal.
Kansas made no grace period for the implementation of this law, so a trans person can’t even drive to the DMV to change their license without committing a crime. Because getting around Kansas likely requires a car, this law not only criminalizes trans people but also cuts off their mobility. How can they go to work? How can they take their children to school? How can they buy food?
New laws require resources to draft, edit, finalize and implement them. But in this case, it wasn’t the execution that was the problem so much as the objective. Getting 1,700 trans drivers off the road does not serve the people of Kansas in any way. It simply undermines the lives of these individuals and their families. As Utah Gov. Spencer Cox noted in his veto of a ban on trans individuals in sports, the number of trans folks (in that case, student athletes) is so small, the legislative push to marginalize them seems much ado about nothing. A waste of time.