A Shawnee County judge on Monday issued a temporary injunction that blocks Gov. Laura Kelly’s administration from allowing transgender Kansans to change their gender markers on driver’s licenses.
District Judge Teresa Watson granted Attorney General Kris Kobach’s request for the injunction, ruling that a new law called the Women’s Bill of Rights requires the sex
designation on driver’s licenses to reflect someone’s biological sex at birth.
She found that the threat of injury to the state should take precedence over any harm the injunction would have on the five transgender Kansans who intervened in the case.
Watson had already issued a temporary restraining order last year halting the Kelly administration policy, and the judge’s order keeps that in place as the case moves forward.
“This decision is a victory for the rule of law and common sense. The Legislature wisely stated that state agencies should record biological sex at birth, and today the court held that the meaning of the law is clear,” Kobach said in a statement.
D.C. Hiegert, LGBGQ+ legal fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas, said Kobach’s interpretation of the law will hurt transgender Kansans.
“We remain unconvinced that the imaginary injury to the state could ever outweigh the enormous harm our clients and other transgender Kansans have and will continue to experience by being forced to carry inaccurate identification documents, in violation of their rights under the state constitution,” Hiegert said.
The law enacted last year – known as SB 180 – requires any state agency, school district or local government that collects vital statistics for public health, crime, economics or other topics to identify each individual as either a male or female at birth.
Kobach says the new law required birth certificates and driver’s licenses to show someone’s sex assigned at birth.
Kobach argued in court that a mere violation of the statute presented irreparable harm. He said law enforcement would be hurt if the new law wasn’t enforced.
Kobach said the inability to enforce the new law could create problems for authorities identifying suspects and serving warrants.
He contended that because driver’s licenses are in circulation for up to six years, there would be illegally issued documents that could not be recovered.
Watson agreed, saying the threat of irreparable injury to the state outweighs any harm the injunction would cause the plaintiffs who intervened in the lawsuit.
“In sum, the language of the statute is clear,” Watson ruled in a 30-page opinion issued Monday afternoon.
The law “applies to require the sex designation on driver’s licenses and the corresponding information in the (state) database to identify the licensee’s biological sex as male or female at birth,” Watson wrote.
Watson said the attorney general pointed to a “reasonable probability of irreparable injury” to law enforcement because driver’s licenses are routinely used to identify suspects, victims, wanted persons, missing persons and others.
“Kansas criminal cases are replete with such references,” she wrote.
Watson cited testimony from Shawnee County Sheriff Brian Hill.
Hill testified that he relied on the sex designation on a driver’s license to identify the subject of a stop and to check for “wants and warrants.”
Hill described a time when he arrested a transgender person who was trying to stab his
landlord.
“The person told Sheriff Hill he was a man, but jail staff later indicated the person was a
woman,” Watson wrote.
“The person showed no criminal history when run through a records check as a man, but
the person’s true criminal history appeared when run through a records check as a woman,” he wrote.
Appointed to the bench by former Gov. Sam Brownback, Watson rejected arguments from the plaintiffs who said the law violated their rights to personal autonomy, informational privacy and equal protection.
Watson said the historic state Supreme Court case that upheld the state constitutional right to an abortion was not applicable in this litigation.
The Supreme Court recognized the right to bodily autonomy in the abortion case, but Watson said it was not relevant in the driver’s license case.
She said applying the Supreme Court abortion case here would be an “unreasonable stretch.”
The Supreme Court, she said, defined personal autonomy in terms of “the ability to control one’s own body, to assert bodily integrity, and to exercise self-determination.”
“Information recorded on a driver’s license does not interfere with transgender persons’ ability to control their own bodies or assert bodily integrity or self-determination,” she said.
“It does not prevent them from ‘making their own decisions regarding their bodies, their health, their family formation, and their family life.'”
The Supreme Court, Watson wrote, “did not say Kansans have a fundamental state constitutional right to control what information is displayed on a state-issued driver’s
license.”
