SCOTUS Decision: Ban on "Talk" Conversion Therapy is Unconstitutional

[smac97]

48 minutes ago, MustardSeed said:

I’ll make the conversation complicated- there’s a case in WA where a Japanese bathhouse was sued for not allowing a trans woman in.  The rule had become you have to have a vagina to participate in the naked activities.  (Surgically or biologically no matter).  The bathhouse lost the suit and now it has gone to federal court.
it is important to me to be considerate of trans people and to treat them like human beings and to be Christlike and all the things. But I do not want a penis exposed to me ever under any circumstance unless I married it or it’s under the age of 3 and there’s dressing involved. 
https://komonews.com/news/local/women-only-spa-takes-fight-over-transgender-access-to-supreme-court-olympus-spa-lynnwood-tacoma-pierce-county-transgender-woman-identity-korean-body-scrubs

From the article:

Quote

At issue is transgender access, specifically transgender women at Olympus Spa, which offers traditional Korean body scrubs, open soaking pools and steam rooms in Lynnwood and Tacoma.

The case stems from a battle that began more than six years ago, when a transgender woman said she was denied access to the spa.

Olympus Spa had a longstanding policy that transgender women are welcome, but not if they are preoperative or have male anatomy.
...

Lead attorney John Bursch said the petition asks the Supreme Court to review the case on behalf of Olympus Spa and uphold the policy.

"We're asking the Supreme Court to review this case on behalf of the Olympus Spa and to hold that a spa that has an all-nude female clientele does not have to allow a male into its nude sauna area simply because he identifies as a woman," Bursch said.

Bursch, with Alliance Defending Freedom, along with lawyers with the Pacific Justice Institute, is asking the high court to hear the case after Olympus Spa appealed an earlier decision to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where it was upheld.

The transgender woman at the center of the case declined to be interviewed for the story. She reportedly called the spa in January 2020 to ask whether she would be admitted and said she was told that transgender women who had not undergone surgery would not be admitted, meaning she would be denied entry.

She filed a complaint with the Washington Human Rights Commission, which ruled that a transgender woman cannot be excluded from women's facilities merely because she is preoperative or has male anatomy. In her complaint, she alleged she was told that "...TRANSGENDER WOMEN WITHOUT SURGERY ARE NOT WELCOME BECAUSE IT COULD MAKE OTHER CUSTOMERS AND STAFF UNCOMFORTABLE..."

Bursch said the spa's policy is not based on identity.

"The whole policy, the entry policy that the spa has, is not based on anyone's identity or their gender expression or their feelings. It's based only on anatomy," Bursch said during a virtual Zoom interview.

So "self-identity" plus surgical transition = "woman."

Is this a valid "limiting principle"?  If not, why not?  If yes, then what do we make of, for example, Lia Thomas?

I'd be interested in hearing others' thoughts on this.

@Analytics, this is one of any number of examples as to why "limiting principles" can be important and necessary.

Thanks,

-Smac

Edited 2 hours ago by smac97

[MustardSeed]

8 minutes ago, smac97 said:

So "self-identity" plus surgical transition = "woman."

To be clear, in my opinion, a trans woman is not a woman a trans woman is a trans woman.  
 

Additionally, I don’t know that the case has anything to do with the establishment or anyone referring to trans women as “women” . The case is as far as I know is purely an issue around whether or not penises are allowed in this private bathhouse offered to women.  
 

 

[smac97]

1 hour ago, MustardSeed said:

To be clear, in my opinion, a trans woman is not a woman a trans woman is a trans woman.  

Thank you for your input.  Could you clarify?  What distinction do you see between "a woman" and "a trans woman"?

If you'd prefer to not clarify, that's fine.

Thanks,

-Smac

[Analytics]

1 hour ago, smac97 said:

From the article:

So "self-identity" plus surgical transition = "woman."

No. Don’t misrepresent the article. From the article, self-identity plus surgical transition = "welcome to use the facility."

I still see no reason for there to be a universal limiting principle. Do you think there needs to be a federal law that says that Olympus Spa should be criminally prosecuted or shut down for allowing people who, according to your so-called “limiting principle” are really men?

Rather than having a “limiting principle”, why can’t we just have a social contract where:

1. If you are transexual, don’t try to make waves about (e.g. don’t wave your penis around in places where people don’t expect to see penises, don’t participate in competitive sport leagues where your physiology gives you an unfair advantage)
2. If you are a venue, make common-sense accommodations based upon the individual circumstances
3. Show everybody some grace

Why isn’t that approach sufficient?

1 hour ago, smac97 said:

Is this a valid "limiting principle"?  If not, why not?

Let's be honest. The only reason we are having this conversation is because some politicians have decided this is a useful issue. 

1 hour ago, smac97 said:

If yes, then what do we make of, for example, Lia Thomas?

According to current NCAA policies:

Quote

The participation policy for transgender student-athletes adopted by the Board of Governors and effective February 6, 2025, does not permit competition by an individual assigned male at birth to compete on a women’s team. The policy is clear that there are no waivers available, and students assigned male at birth may not compete on a women’s team with amended birth certificates or other forms of ID. Student-athletes assigned male at birth may not receive athletic scholarships that are otherwise designated for women. If competition occurs, the team will be considered a mixed team and not eligible to compete against women’s teams. This also applies to a student-athlete assigned male at birth competing as an individual against women. Such individual competition is not permitted under the policy. Any previous policies that permitted mixed team competition against a women’s team are rendered moot and not applicable as the BOG policy adopted in February 2025 supersedes all previous policies.

Are you okay with that policy? Or do you think the policy needs to be updated with a “delimiting principle” that defines what a woman is, and then determine eligibility for competing based on that definition? 

For the record, I have no problem with this. If you are transgender and want to swim, then swim with the boys. Or don’t swim. That is a reasonable compromise that the stakeholders can make.

1 hour ago, smac97 said:

I'd be interested in hearing others' thoughts on this.

@Analytics, this is one of any number of examples as to why "limiting principles" can be important and necessary.

What do you think of the new Kansas law? From today’s New York Times:

Quote

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.

Kirchstein, who is 41, had transitioned in 2023. She had changed her legal name and her gender marker in the Social Security system, on her passport card and on her Kansas driver’s license. It required jumping through a lot of bureaucratic hoops — the name change alone required a court hearing and proof that Kirchstein had notified her bank, credit card company, landlord and others — but it was worth it, to make it official.

Now she considered disobeying the instruction from the Division of Vehicles. She went down some internet rabbit holes to figure out what the consequences might be. It appeared that if she was caught driving with an invalid license, she would be fined and sent to jail for five days; if caught doing it more than twice, she would face three months in jail. 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.

Afraid of getting pulled over, she asked a friend to drive her the next day. At the Division of Vehicles, located in a mall across from a Burger King and next to the Kaw Valley Bridge Club, she handed a clerk the letter she had received. Without looking at her, the clerk made a notation and sent Kirchstein to wait to be called. The next staff person didn’t look at her either — just took her paperwork and, a few minutes later, handed her a temporary paper license with the “M” gender marker. Kirchstein started crying. As she walked toward the exit, she thought that she could see it in the faces of many of the people standing in line: They’d gotten the letter, too.

“We apologize for the inconvenience this causes you,” the letter said.

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. Even before Donald Trump was elected for the second time, more than half the states had considered or passed legislation limiting the rights of trans people. The process has intensified in the last year and a half, and the law enacted in Kansas in February is one of the most restrictive pieces of anti-trans legislation passed in any state so far.

The law, Senate Bill 244, redefined “gender” to mean “biological sex at birth” and directed state agencies to revoke and reissue driver’s licenses and birth certificates that had previously been changed to align with people’s identities. It also directed all government and public buildings to designate “multiple-occupancy private spaces” — bathrooms, locker rooms, dressing rooms — as reserved for one sex. Like the infamous 2021 Texas law that enabled ordinary people to sue any person perceived as helping someone get an abortion, S.B. 244 created a bounty system, allowing people in Kansas to sue, for “actual damages or liquidated damages in the amount of $1,000, as well as declaratory and injunctive relief,” anyone they suspected of violating the bathroom provision.

With the possible exception of Lawrence (and even Lawrence is a stretch), Kansas is a place where a person cannot survive without a car — can’t go to work, can’t shop for groceries, never mind see friends or go to a movie. And let’s talk about the bathrooms. All trans people are accustomed to some level of stress when it comes to bathrooms. Take me, a person fortunate enough to live in a blue state and work in a supportive environment. I prefer not to use the men’s room at work lest my presence discomfit male colleagues who know that I was assigned female at birth, and I prefer not to use the women’s room lest my presence discomfit women who don’t know me and would perceive me as male. The New York Times building has many single-occupancy bathrooms designated as “gender-neutral.” They are on different floors than the one where I work, and on a couple of occasions, during high-traffic times in the building, I’ve been late for a meeting because I was stuck waiting for an elevator. That is a minor inconvenience.

Now take a trans person in Kansas. Matthew Neumann, the executive director (and until recently the sole employee) of the L.G.B.T.Q. Foundation of Kansas, told me that his organization had heard from one trans man who was fired for leaving the state building where he worked to use the bathroom in another building. Another trans man, who switched to using the women’s bathroom pre-emptively, explains the law to anyone he encounters there, lest that person be startled by his presence. Imagine having to come out to strangers this way every time you have to pee. Alternatively, imagine being unable to use a bathroom outside your home. Then imagine having to choose between not driving, because your license is invalid, and outing yourself as trans every time you enter a club, buy an alcoholic beverage, go to a building where security personnel check ID (an office building, your kid’s school), vote (Kansas is one of 10 states that require so-called strict photo ID to vote), rent a car, check into a hotel or are stopped for a traffic violation.

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.”

A study by the Williams Institute found that about 21 percent of trans Americans have served in the armed forces, more than double the national average. In Perdue’s age group, the percentage may be even higher. She signed up for the Army right out of college, in 2016, soon after President Barack Obama’s administration announced a new policy allowing transgender troops to serve openly and to get gender-affirming care. She was out to all her friends but had not transitioned medically. The recruiter advised enlisting as a man and coming out once she was already in the service. The military had guidelines, an established process for transitioning troops, and this process could require one to stay in one place for a year or more. Perdue decided to wait until after basic training, then until after officer school, then until after her first deployment — and then it was March 2019, she was in the woods in Poland, scrolling through Reddit, and she learned that the Pentagon was going to make good on President Trump’s 2017 promise to ban trans troops.

Lieutenant Perdue had less than a month before the new policy went into effect. She got her official diagnosis of “gender dysphoria” just two days before the deadline. She started hormones in March 2021. But, she told me, “I’d seen the writing on the wall.” Yes, Joe Biden was by then president and things might change again (they did), but then they could change right back (they have). Perdue decided to get out of the military while she was still young enough to start a civilian career.

She moved to Manhattan, Kan., and enrolled in Kansas State University’s aviation program. In February 2025 she received her certification as a flight instructor. But she had not considered that flight instruction is, as she puts it, a “very public-facing job.” Perdue’s résumé gets her a lot of first interviews. She has traveled all over the country for them. And she has learned to recognize a look. “Their eyes kind of dim once they realize you are a trans person,” she said. They seem to think that their customers will not want to learn flying from a trans woman who doesn’t particularly try to pass — and at 6-foot-4, probably couldn’t. The one job she was offered, in New Jersey, paid so little that she couldn’t afford to take it.

Perdue changed her name and the gender marker on all her documents in 2022. In 2023, the Kansas Legislature passed Senate Bill 180, which backers called the “women’s bill of rights.” It defined sex as biological and binary and decreed that “‘female’ is an individual whose biological reproductive system is developed to produce ova, and a ‘male’ is an individual whose biological reproductive system is developed to fertilize the ova of a female.” (It was, in other words, an earlier version of an executive order Trump signed on the first day of his second term in office; that was titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”) The Democratic governor of Kansas, Laura Kelly, vetoed the bill. The Legislature overrode the veto.

Perdue didn’t think the new law would affect her — it seemed like a symbolic pronouncement. Then the state’s attorney general, Kris Kobach, a longtime Trump ally, sued to bar state agencies from allowing the use of gender markers different from the sex people were assigned at birth. He claimed that he was trying to enforce S.B. 180. A court temporarily granted his request. Perdue, meanwhile, moved into a new house and excitedly sent away for a driver’s license with the new address. The license came back with the gender marker “M.”

In 2025, a state appeals court reversed the lower court’s decision. Perdue went back to the Division of Vehicles and got a license with the marker “F,” as on all her other ID cards. Less than a year later, the Legislature passed S.B. 244. Perdue got what trans Kansans refer to as the Letter — the same one Kirchstein got, informing her that her driver’s license would expire by the end of the day. It was 2:30 in the afternoon when she took the envelope out of her mailbox. She thought it was lucky that she had the day off — she got her new/old driver’s license with the “M” marker before close of business.

All this back-and-forth with the gender marker was absurd, and this is how Perdue experienced it: as ridiculous more than threatening. She had been living openly and happily in small-town Kansas for five years, and she didn’t see that changing. But she was also going through a divorce (Perdue married when she was 22, the same year she joined the military), which required going to court.

She pulled up a photo on her phone. It showed a bathroom door in the courthouse, painted institutional yellow. A printed notice attached with blue masking tape summarized the bathroom provisions of S.B. 244 and warned: “Any violation of this law may subject the individual to civil and criminal penalties.” It no longer seemed so ridiculous.

Perdue moved in with her boyfriend, a trans man, in Missouri, but both of them realize that this is probably only a temporary solution. “The problem is that Kansas is kind of a test case,” she told me. “It shows what’s possible.” Missouri, where Republicans hold both houses of the legislature and the Statehouse, had considered its own driver’s license and bathroom bills. The couple have been talking about moving to Chicago. In the meantime, Perdue is working as a caregiver and studying to be an airplane mechanic, a less public position in which she hopes she will be more employable.

Some days are happy. On July 7, I went to the Douglas County courthouse in Lawrence to attend a name-change hearing. The petitioner was a 36-year-old trans woman whose last name was Baney and whose legal first name, which she wanted to change, sounded like a parody of a macho all-American name. She was very nervous. She had been in a courtroom only once before, for a custody hearing, and that hadn’t gone well: She gets her 7-year-old daughter only every other weekend.

The judge, Mark Simpson, had a kind voice. He asked a series of yes-or-no questions, establishing that Baney was a resident of Kansas and had given proper notice of her name change. Baney, wearing a flowy white and blue dress, fidgeted behind the podium. The judge signed her petition and said, “Congratulations. Congratulations, Tracy!”

Later Baney emailed me about that “Congratulations, Tracy!” line: “That was so amazing I hope I never forget it.” As we left the courthouse, she exclaimed excitedly, “My mother is going to hate this!”

Baney, who grew up with her mother in Nebraska, was around 13 when she was caught in the girls’ locker room trying on someone’s clothes. Things at home got tense enough that she ended up moving to Kansas to live with her father, a Trump-voting, immigrant-hating, gun-toting man, and he became the center of her world. She enlisted and, as a gift from her father, got a large tattoo of a bald eagle wrapped in an American flag with dog tags around its neck; the low-cut dress she wore to her name-change hearing exposed most of it. After her father died four years ago, Baney started therapy, began identifying as trans and bisexual, and began her medical transition. Now she says she is the happiest she has been in her adult life. She has found a community in Lawrence. She has a boyfriend who works as a custodian at the same large manufacturing plant where she works in maintenance; they take lunch together. It’s hard to square that happiness — and that name-change hearing — with the new anti-trans law and the fear it has generated. “I have whiplash,” she told me.

I had whiplash, too. It’s as if there are two Kansases — a kind, loving Kansas where neighbors accept one another and churches offer sanctuary to immigrants and create summer camps for queer kids. I visited such a summer camp outside of Wichita on the first day of its weeklong session. Ninety-seven middle schoolers and high schoolers, with hair every shade of the rainbow and more sartorial finery than one might see at a prom, had been delivered to Camp Sunflower by their parents, who placed their progeny’s duffel bags in the designated pile and handed over their medication bottles and prescriptions to the designated staff members. Amanda Mogoi, a straight married mother of three who runs a Wichita clinic that provides care to some 4,000 trans people, was on hand to set up the orderly distribution of whatever antidepressants, A.D.H.D. medication or hormones the campers had been prescribed.

Mogoi’s clinic has a decorative fish tank filled with figurines of queer mermaids, and every room features a mural of a queer hero: Elliot Page, Harvey Milk, Jonathan Van Ness — and the Obamas. When S.B. 244 passed, Mogoi hastily organized a wedding in the clinic’s lobby: One of the nurse practitioners was engaged to a trans man, and they wanted to get married in time to avoid his being marked as “F” on the marriage license. Now Mogoi is running for an open seat in the Kansas Legislature. Her slogan is “Midwest kindness, real solutions.”

And then there is Kris Kobach’s Kansas. Kobach’s website boasts that he brought the first case against the Obama administration over Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, representing Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents seeking broader powers to detain and deport. He sued the Biden administration repeatedly and challenged vaccine mandates in court. Kobach served as Kansas’ secretary of state from 2011 to 2019, and in that time he instituted some of the strictest voter ID regulations in the country. During the first Trump administration, he served as vice chair of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, an early institutional effort to sow doubt about the integrity of our elections. As attorney general, he has pursued a policy agenda as closely aligned with Trump’s as any in the country. Anti-trans legislation has been a centerpiece.

“I knew it was coming because they do something like this every year,” Abi Boatman, a state representative, told me. Boatman was appointed to fill a vacant seat at the beginning of the 2026 legislative session. She is the only out trans person in the Legislature, and only the second trans legislator in Kansas history. The court ruling that blocked Kobach’s early effort to prevent Kansans from changing their gender markers had come down after the previous legislative session ended. Now Republican state legislators used a maneuver known as gut and go, when the text of a pending bill is entirely replaced by something unrelated. The original S.B. 244 had concerned bail bonds; the Republican state representatives stripped that language out and replaced it with a set of anti-trans provisions, allowing legislators to drastically shorten public comment and testimony, leaving open, among others, the question of how schools and other public buildings should cover the expense of reconfiguring their facilities in the manner the law required. “I’m not saying that transgender rights is not a divisive issue,” Boatman told me. “I’m saying most Kansans don’t want to spend millions of dollars to fix bathrooms that don’t need to be fixed.”

I asked Boatman how she was managing after the law was enacted. The Kansas State Capitol in Topeka is a grand 19th-century building whose ornate frescoes, murals and exhibits attract droves of tourists daily. It’s also a public building that is subject to the bathroom provisions of S.B. 244. “I have my separate but equal bathroom,” Boatman said — the Capitol’s one single-occupancy bathroom, which doubles as a lactation room. (“So now you are pitting a breastfeeding woman against a trans woman,” Boatman told me ruefully.) One time there was a call of the House, a parliamentary procedure used to create a quorum. Boatman didn’t hear the call because she was on a different floor, awaiting her turn in the bathroom. Later, a fellow legislator called her out for having been absent. “I was using the only bathroom this Legislature has said I can use,” she said.

The State Capitol is one of a few major tourist attractions in Topeka. Another is the Westboro Baptist Church, infamous for spewing hate against gays, trans people, Jews, soldiers and many other groups, and for winning a 2011 Supreme Court case that secured its right to do so in audacious ways. The church displays hate messages in rotation on a giant marquee. (I won’t quote them, but if you hover over this phrase, you’ll see the URL the church uses.) Two houses stand across the street from the church, one painted the rainbow colors of the L.G.B.T.Q. flag, the other pink, white and blue, the colors of the trans flag. Two visions of Kansas, silently facing off day after day.

Another tourist attraction in Topeka, less than 10 minutes’ drive from Boatman’s “separate but equal” bathroom, is the building that once housed Monroe Elementary, the school at the center of Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 case in which the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. The building is now a museum managed by the National Park Service. It’s a good place to learn about the long history of Kansas choosing what kind of state it wanted to be. In the 19th century, Kansas heeded the abolitionist John Brown’s call to join the union as a free state. After the Civil War, the Black population of the state grew and grew, but it took a decision of the Supreme Court to end segregation in Kansas. For the purposes of this article, it seems important to note that the winning argument in Brown v. Board of Education was likely to have been conceived in 1944 by Pauli Murray, then a Howard University law student who would go on to become a leading civil rights attorney and also a person who repeatedly sought and was denied gender-affirming care.

Charles, who asked me to use only his first name, lives in one of those places in Kansas where the nearest post office is a couple of towns over and the nearest town is a ghost town. Geographically speaking, most of Kansas fits this description. Charles grew up here. He lived out on the West Coast for eight years — this was after he left the evangelical church in which he was raised — but 18 years ago he returned to Kansas for “family, chosen family, price of land, warm weather, thunderstorms, the night sky, the tallgrass prairie, wide horizons,” as he told me. “The family (relatives) bit of that didn’t turn out so well,” he added later in a text message, “but I still love the rest of it.” He and his mother have barely spoken since he came out to her as trans in 2023 — four years after he actually started his transition. But his next-door neighbor, who is also his boss at the cattle ranch where he has worked for most of the last dozen years, is supportive, as are friends.

The night before Charles went in to change his driver’s license, he couldn’t sleep. He got up and gave himself an extra-short haircut. In the morning he put on a T-shirt that accentuated his cattle-rancher muscles. A friend drove him the roughly 30 miles to Emporia, where the Division of Vehicles shares a mostly deserted mall with a dialysis center. When it came time to take his picture, Charles scowled as best he could, to underscore the absurdity of his face appearing on a driver’s license with an “F” gender marker.

Now he regrets changing the license. Charles had assumed that he would get the Letter, because when he renewed his license in January, a clerk told him that his license had been “flagged,” and Charles figured it was because he’d changed his gender marker back in 2022. So when the Legislature overrode the governor’s veto, he texted his boss, alerting him that he might not have a valid driver’s license the next day. The boss told him to stay on the clock while he took care of the paperwork, the boss’s small way of trying to make things better. But then days passed, and the Letter never came, and Charles wonders if it ever would have.

Fascism works not only by the passage of arbitrary, dehumanizing laws but by the arbitrary, dehumanizing enforcement of the laws. Only about 1,700 people have received the Letter; this is certainly only a fraction of Kansans who have changed their gender marker. Several people who have not yet received it — including Abi Boatman, the legislator — told me that they regularly checked the state website to see if their old license still came up as valid. If so, is it safe to drive with it? The license is still illegal under the law. Amanda Mogoi, who runs the clinic in Wichita, told me that some of her trans patients have received the Letter three times while most haven’t received it once; some who tried to update their driver’s licenses without the Letter weren’t able to.

On May 5, Kris Ripper, a trans woman, was stopped while driving home from work for failing to turn on her headlights in the rain. The police officer repeatedly asked her why her license indicated that she was male; she explained that the law required it. Almost two months later she found out that she had been charged with a misdemeanor for driving without a valid license. (Ripper talked to another trans reporter about her predicament, but declined to speak with me.) The charge was eventually dropped, but not before she was threatened with a $1,000 fine and jail time.

In the 1930s, a German Jewish jurist named Ernst Fraenkel developed a model he called the dual state. It is a state in which some people are subjected to increasingly restrictive laws that are applied arbitrarily while others continue to live in a regular, rules-based society. Fraenkel referred to the former as the prerogative state — a state whose defining characteristic is the authorities’ exercise of their prerogatives — and the latter the normative state. Fraenkel’s theory has enjoyed something of a renaissance in the United States during Trump’s second term, probably because it helps many Americans square their understanding of a rising autocracy with their subjective experience of daily life continuing as before. 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.

When S.B. 244 passed, Amanda Mogoi started giving her patients letters to carry around attesting to their gender-affirming treatment, and including her nursing license number and contact information. She learned this approach from her husband, a Kenyan immigrant. Even though he has legally lived in the United States for two decades, until recently, he carried what Mogoi describes as a giant accordion folder in his car, containing his immigration papers, his nurse-practitioner diploma, their marriage license, photographs of their family and more. It came in handy, Mogoi said, when he was “sundowned out of a town” where he had gone to see a patient. She added, “I’m afraid that’s where we are headed with our trans folks.”

It was striking to hear Mogoi make that comparison. But this is part of the dual-state effect: the shocking realization that you can suddenly be thrown into the category of people who can’t drive down a country road without risking running afoul of the rules. And once you are in that category, you can’t hide. Charles, for example, lives 25 miles from where he grew up. People here have known him since childhood. Many have been either supportive or quietly accepting of his transition. But that was before the Kansas attorney general and the U.S. president declared war on trans people. “It worries me sometimes,” Charles said. “It’s a rural area. And everybody’s got guns.”

“This is a state-created refugee crisis,” said Samantha Boucher, a political organizer based in Denver. Boucher used to work in disaster relief. “You know how some trans people overcompensate?” she asked me by way of explaining why, before transitioning, she had done the manliest of jobs in the scariest of situations. When S.B. 244 passed, she called a friend, a straight cis man she’d worked with on several disaster deployments, and together they started a rescue effort she named Operation Lifeboat. There is no public database of people in Kansas who are trans or who opted to change their gender markers, but it’s possible to use publicly available information to find people who have legally changed their first names. Using this and other creative sleuthing, Operation Lifeboat did a text blast to roughly 30,000 people who were likely to be trans or friends of the trans community, and several hundred responded to ask Operation Lifeboat for help.

I have written about many displaced people in different parts of the world. One thing I’ve learned is that the people who leave first are usually those who have resources, those who have connections elsewhere, those who have traveled. Generally speaking, these are not the people who are hit hardest by whatever disaster they are escaping. In Kansas, for example, it’s the working-class people who have jobs that require a driver’s license, the people whose bathroom breaks are timed, the people who can’t afford to pay a fine if they are issued a citation who are likely to feel the effects of S.B. 244 most acutely. “The people who call us are usually flat broke and desperate,” said Keira Richards, who is also based in Colorado and runs another organization for displaced trans people, the Trans Continental Pipeline. In November 2023, during an event for Transgender Day of Remembrance, an annual commemoration of victims of anti-trans violence, Richards and her friends noticed a lot of new arrivals. That year, state legislatures across the country considered a record-breaking 615 anti-trans laws and passed 87 of them, according to the research organization Trans Legislation Tracker. (In 2025, the group found that well over 1,000 anti-trans bills were considered and 126 passed.) These included bathroom bills; gender marker bills; bills banning drag, books and gender-inclusive language in schools; and bills restricting access to gender-affirming care. So trans people and their families were leaving states like Texas, Utah and Idaho. Many of them were moving next door, to blue Colorado.

“And then I was standing on a picnic table saying, ‘What if we created a Welcome Wagon?’” At the time Richards, who is now 27, was working in the office of the Colorado state auditor. She began with research. “And in the process I learned how horrible it was in other places. I met a girl who just got in her car and started driving.” This was a truck driver from Texas. Someone from Missouri got a one-way ticket to Denver, where they knew no one. Those people needed a lot more than a Welcome Wagon — they needed help deciding where to settle; they needed transportation and temporary housing; they needed help finding doctors, schools and other resources at their destination. Richards registered a nonprofit organization, quit her job, and started raising money by selling patches at punk music concerts. By June 2024, she had raised less than $6,000. Then Trump got re-elected and donations started pouring in, along with requests for help. The Trans Continental Pipeline has now raised more than $1.5 million, employs two part-time staff members and dozens of volunteers. It has assisted some 400 people, almost 100 of them with what Richards calls “full relocation,” and it has helped 10 similar organizations get off the ground. Most of their clients — internally known as trans-plants — left Texas, Oklahoma and Florida, though since the passage of S.B. 244, a majority of cases have come from Kansas.

Take, for example, D., A. and T., three trans men who asked me not to use their full names, who were part of a large polycule in Lawrence.

When S.B. 244 passed, D. said that he had to leave Kansas. He could not even contemplate being outed. A. decided to go with him. T. wasn’t sure he was emotionally equipped to move. “Everyone I care about is in Kansas,” he told me. “But then we were having a shitload of ICE activity in tiny little Lawrence. I get around on a mobility scooter, I look vaguely Hispanic, even though I’m not, and I look clearly queer.” It was T. who filled out an application on the Trans Continental Pipeline website.

A recent report conducted by the Williams Institute at the U.C.L.A. School of Law showed that almost half of the transgender Americans surveyed were considering leaving or had already left their state or the country. Most of them cited the “anti-trans climate” in their state. Many can’t leave, though. Tracy Baney, the woman whose name-change hearing I attended, can’t leave because her 7-year-old daughter is in Kansas.

Abi Boatman, the state legislator, has already had to start her life from scratch once. Back in 2011 — after the end of the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy but before the Obama administration allowed trans people to serve openly in the military — Boatman, who had been in the service for more than a decade, came out and was forced to take a medical discharge. Her wife took the kids and left. Only since last fall has Boatman had contact with her older child, and it has been as exhilarating and as difficult as anything she could have imagined. In April, Boatman remarried; she met her wife at an ICE protest in 2018. They held the ceremony on their front porch in Wichita. “This is where I’ve made my life,” she told me on that same front porch. “This is where I live. I don’t think I should have to leave just because some Republican lawmakers think I don’t belong here.”

Lawrence is a town full of cheap vintage shops and queer-friendly bars, a town where there are drag shows every week, a town where people making very little money can afford to live — and when they fall short, the community will reliably step in to cover the night’s drinks or the month’s rent. These are some of the things Siobhan Kirchstein loves about it: her friends at Lawrence Pride, the mutual aid, the performance classes she takes with a drag king named Johnny Diablo, the queer pool tournament in which she has had some excellent showings and the life-work balance she found here since dropping out of her master’s program in religious studies and taking a job as a custodian in one of the lab buildings at the University of Kansas.

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.”

Kirchstein was stunned. Everyone in the building — the people she works with, the people she cleans up after — knows her. Everyone, she thought, had her back. At the beginning, the letter said, “I wish to preface this email by acknowledging this is a sensitive matter and my intention in reaching out is to provide awareness of the report and the law, extend to you an opportunity to be heard, and if helpful, share resources.” Three paragraphs down, it said, “Regardless, please ensure you are adhering to S.B. 244.”

It reminded me of an extraordinary artifact on display at the Brown v. Board of Education museum. It’s a letter from the Public Schools of Topeka to one of the Black teachers in the district. In anticipation of the Supreme Court ordering the desegregation of schools, it terminates her employment, because, it says, white parents probably aren’t going to want a Black teacher in the classroom. “I think I understand that all of you must be under considerable strain, and I sympathize with the uncertainties and inconveniences which you must experience,” the letter said. It’s that same way of putting a concerned face on dehumanizing demands that Kirchstein described as “soft fascism” the first time we spoke.

Kirchstein’s supervisor suggested she take the afternoon off. After a couple of hours, she made a decision. She forwarded the email she had received to me and a reporter at The Lawrence Times, and left a request for representation on the website of the A.C.L.U. of Kansas. Then she headed over to Harbour Lights to figure out her next steps. She wasn’t going anywhere. She was going to fight.

Do you agree with Kansas law? That you must use the restroom that corresponds with the sex on your original birth certificate and that “any violation of this law may subject the individual to civil and criminal penalties."

"Fascism works not only by the passage of arbitrary, dehumanizing laws but by the arbitrary, dehumanizing enforcement of the laws."

And that’s how you come across. It seems very, very, important to you that human beings be placed into one of two boxes, either “male” or “female”. It logically follows that if you don’t congruently fit into one of those two boxes, you aren’t human.