TOPEKA, Kansas (AP) — Kansas-born transgender people could be prevented from changing their birth certificates to reflect their gender identities if the conservative Republican state attorney is successful with a legal measure he launched Friday. at night.
Attorney General Kris Kobach filed a petition in federal court asking a judge to end a requirement for Kansas to allow transgender people to change their birth certificates. He is not looking to undo past changes, just to prevent them from going forward.
U.S. District Judge Daniel Crabtree imposed the requirement in 2019 to resolve a lawsuit brought by four transgender Kansas residents against three state health department officials. The lawsuit challenged a policy that critics said prevented transgender people from making changes even after transitioning, legally changing their names and getting new driver’s licenses and Social Security cards.
Luc Bensimon, a black transgender activist who was one of the plaintiffs in that lawsuit, said Saturday that he was already receiving calls and emails from people trying to change their birth certificates who were worried they would not be able to complete the process.
“We didn’t review that case just for him to try to change it now,” Bensimon said. “I thought this was fixed by now, but I have the energy to go back and try again if necessary.”
It was unclear whether Kobach’s effort would succeed, given a US Supreme Court decision in 2020 Declaring a federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in employment also prevents discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.
Also in 2020, federal judges in Idaho and Ohio struck down rules against transgender people changing their birth certificates. But this month, federal judges in Tennessee and Oklahoma dismissed challenges to two of the nation’s few remaining state policies against such changes.
Kobach’s move seems to be in line with a radical new Kansas law Going into effect July 1 that reverses the rights of transgender people, it was signed into law by the Republican-controlled Legislature over a veto by Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly. A memo filed electronically with Kobach’s application shortly before midnight cited the law as a reason to revise the 2019 agreement.
Kelly’s office did not immediately return a message Saturday seeking a reaction to Kobach’s decision.
The memo argued that Crabtree’s order makes it “impossible” to comply with the new state law and that since the Legislature “has spoken,” the state health department, which handles birth certificates, is now “obligated to execute the law as it is written.”
Kobach had already scheduled a news conference for Monday afternoon at the Statehouse to discuss the application of the new law.
Crabtree’s 2019 order blocked a policy imposed by former Republican Gov. Sam Brownback’s administration that was among the toughest against changes to birth certificates in the US. Kelly is a strong supporter of LGBTQ+ rights and her administration agreed to settle the lawsuit less than six months after she took office.
That decision came nearly a year after Crabtree declared that the Kansas policy violated transgender people’s constitutional rights to due process of law and equal treatment under the law. His order notes that federal courts in Idaho and Puerto Rico struck down the no-trade policies. Kobach’s memo called those rulings obsolete.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas and the LGBTQ+ rights legal group Lambda Legal, which represents the four Kansas residents, condemned Kobach’s move. Omar Gonzalez-Pagan of Lamda Legal called it “unnecessary and cruel.”
Kansas ACLU Executive Director Micah Kubic added in a statement: “Mr. Kobach should rethink the wisdom, and sheer indecency, of this attempt to weaponize his office’s authority to attack transgender Kansas people who are just trying to live their lives.”
The new Kansas law is designed to prevent transgender people from using single-gender bathrooms, locker rooms and other facilities associated with their identities. At least nine other states have such laws, mostly focused on public schools.
Kobach has said he believes the new Kansas law also prevents transgender people from changing their driver’s licenses, although the law contains no specific enforcement mechanisms. Lawmakers wrote the bill to prevent transgender people from changing their birth certificates, except for the 2019 federal court order, without specifically mentioning birth certificates or driver’s licenses.
For weeks, a project by Kansas Legal Services, a nonprofit law firm, encouraged transgender Kansas to change their driver’s licenses before the new law went into effect. The Kelly administration, which oversees driver licensing, has not said whether it believes such changes will continue to be allowed under the new law.
Ellen Bertels, the attorney leading the effort, said that while a transgender person could sue after the law goes into effect to protect people’s right to change their driver’s licenses, a lawsuit by a state official against the administration de Kelly could try to prevent such changes.
As for birth certificates, the small number of states that don’t allow transgender people to change them was narrowed through previous federal court challenges like the one in Kansas.
The ACLU of Montana says it plans to challenge a rule imposed there last year that prohibited people from changing the sex listed on their birth certificates.
LGBTQ+ rights advocates say changing birth certificates, driver’s licenses and other records to reflect a transgender person’s gender identity is key to affirming their identities and often greatly improves their mental health.
Policies against changing birth certificates and other documents also have practical implications for transgender residents. For example, Kansas requires voters to show photo identification at the polls or when obtaining an absentee ballot.
Critics of the new Kansas law argue that it is designed to legally erase transgender people.
It declares that state law recognizes only two genders, male and female, and defines them based on a person’s “biological reproductive system” at birth. A woman is someone whose system “is designed to produce eggs,” while a man is only someone with a system “designed to fertilize a woman’s eggs.”
The law then declares that “important governmental objectives” to protect the health, safety, and privacy of individuals justify having segregated spaces by sex according to those definitions.
Associated Press writer Amy Hanson in Helena, Montana contributed to this report.
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