What's happening in Kansas should alarm us all

On Feb. 25, Siobhan Kirchstein received an official letter from the Kansas Division of Vehicles instructing her to surrender her driver’s license. She was one of hundreds of Kansans who received such letters when Senate Bill 244, a hastily passed piece of legislation, invalidated driver’s licenses on which the gender marker did not match the holder’s sex as assigned at birth.

“Additionally, please note that the Legislature did not include a grace period for updating credentials,” the letter said. “This means that once the law is officially enacted, your current credential will be invalid immediately.” The law was going into effect the next day."

She’d heard that Kansas might be placing transgender women in men’s prisons, and she feared violence, even rape. So, while some friends wondered aloud whether the state was really going to enforce the new law, Kirchstein decided to comply.

Some of the words or expressions in this article may at first blush seem hyperbolic. One of them is “fascism.” That’s how Kirschstein characterized the process when we met in Lawrence in July: “It was soft fascism.” It was. Fascism usually begins with redefining the nation by excluding certain groups, which are branded threats to national health and unity. The Trump administration has fixated on two groups most of all — immigrants and trans people — in just this way, smearing us (I am a member of both groups) as predatory, sick, at once subhuman and terrifyingly powerful.

Which brings me back to the word “fascism.” In 1938, Nazi Germany passed a law requiring Jews to add a specific middle name to their identity documents — Israel for men, Sara for women — so that they could be easily identifiable. “It would be laughable, if one couldn’t lose one’s reason over it,” the German Jewish linguist Victor Klemperer wrote in his diary at the time.

“I got the hint. I left.” I met Olivia Perdue at a roadside Panera Bread not far from her home in Missouri, where she had moved a week earlier. Perdue laid a half-dozen laminated ID cards on the greasy glossy table in front of us. “The V.A. thinks I’m female, the F.A.A. thinks I’m female, the Social Security Administration thinks I’m female, the state of Missouri thinks I’m male.”

It’s as if there are two Kansases — one of them a kind, loving Kansas where neighbors accept one another and churches offer sanctuary to immigrants and create summer camps for queer kids.

In Nazi Germany, the prerogative state was small: It encompassed some 600,000 Jews and even smaller numbers of Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, members of the Communist Party and the physically and mentally disabled. In the United States, Black people, Indigenous people and many immigrants, at a minimum, have long — have always — experienced state power as arbitrary and violent. That’s a much larger group. But even so, when the prerogative state expands, it shocks us: When a white U.S. citizen is shot by an immigration agent, or when a white person in Kansas wakes up to find out that they no longer have a valid ID — in a sense, to find that they are now undocumented in their own country.

Two days after I interviewed Kirchstein at Harbour Lights, the bar that hosts the queer pool tournament, and just over four months after she got the Letter about her driver’s license, she got another letter. “I am reaching out to you from human resources in response to a report received that I have an obligation to follow up on,” it said. “The report received was that you used a restroom in Parker Hall on the first floor in violation of Kansas Senate Bill 244 on June 22, 2026.”

This one is a downer but also talks about the Trans Continental Pipeline and other acts of defiance. And hopefully it speaks to others too.