The advocates predicted that it would prevent transgender people from changing their driver's licenses and amounted to a legal “erasure” of their identities, something Kobach confirmed as the intent when he issued his legal opinion.

Kelly is a strong supporter of LGBTQ+ rights and vetoed the measure, but the Legislature overrode her.īut the governor's statements about the new law are at odds with descriptions from LGBTQ+ rights advocates before the Republican-controlled Legislature enacted it over Kelly's veto. Her office said lawyers in her administration had concluded that doing so doesn't violate the new law. The governor's office said last week that the state health department, which handles birth certificates, and the motor vehicle division, which issues driver's licenses, would continue allowing transgender people to change the markers for sex on those documents. It also says that 'important governmental objectives' of protecting people's privacy, health and safety justify single-sex spaces such as bathrooms and locker rooms. That new law defines a person's sex as male or female, based on the 'biological reproductive system' identified at birth, applying that definition to any state law or regulation. The number of driver's licenses changes accelerated in May and June as LGBTQ+ rights advocates encouraged people to do it ahead of the new law. About 400 have changed their driver's licenses in that period, about four times as many a month this year as previously. More than 900 people in Kansas have changed the listing for sex on their birth certificates in the past four years. He staged a political comeback last year by winning the attorney general's race as she captured a second term, both of them by slim margins.

Kelly won her first term as governor in 2018 by defeating Kobach, who was then the Kansas secretary of state. The Legislature has anti-abortion Republican supermajorities, but a statewide vote in August 2022 decisively affirmed abortion rights. Senate race, but Democrats have won half of the governor's races with support from GOP moderates. In the past 50 years, Republicans have won every U.S. The dispute between Kobach and Kelly highlights an odd feature of their generally conservative state's modern politics.

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