A federal judge ruled Thursday that Kansas officials shouldn't keep changing transgender people's birth certificates so the documents reflect their gender identities. US District Judge Daniel Crabtree approved Republican state Attorney General Kris Kobach's request to block the changes because of a new state law rolling back trans rights. Kansas joins Montana, Oklahoma, and Tennessee in barring such birth certificate changes. Kansas is for now also among a few states that don't let trans people change their driver's licenses to reflect their gender identities, the AP reports. That's because of a separate state-court lawsuit Kobach filed last month. Both efforts are responses to the new state law that took effect July 1.
In federal court, Kobach succeeded in lifting a policy imposed when Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly's administration settled a 2018 lawsuit filed by four transgender people challenging a previous Republican no-changes policy. The settlement came only months after Kelly took office in 2019 and required the state to start changing trans people's birth certificates. More than 900 people have done so since. Transgender Kansas residents and Kelly argued that refusing to change birth certificates would violate rights protected by the US Constitution, something Crabtree said in his brief order approving the settlement four years ago. Kobach argued that the settlement represented only the views of the parties and that the new state law represents a big enough change to nullify the settlement's requirements.
The new Kansas law defines male and female as the sex assigned at birth, based on a person's "biological reproductive system," applying those definitions to any other state law or regulation. The Republican-controlled Legislature enacted it over Kelly's veto, but she announced shortly before it took effect that birth certificate changes would continue, citing opinions from attorneys in her administration that they could. In the state-court lawsuit over driver's licenses, a district judge has blocked ID changes until at least Nov. 1. The new Kansas law was part of a wave of measures rolling back trans rights emerging from Republican-controlled statehouses across the nation this year.
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