In February, Kansas became the first state in the country to do something that, until very recently, would have been the stuff of dystopian fiction: it revoked the driver’s licenses and birth certificates of transgender residents. Red states are creating lists of transgender residents.
Letters started arriving in mailboxes telling people, in plain bureaucratic language, that the documents they use to vote, drive, board planes, fill prescriptions, and prove their identity were no longer valid.
The mechanism that made this possible was not new. The state government created a list of transgender residents.
Since 2019, Kansas had been quietly keeping an internal record of every transgender person who changed the gender marker on their birth certificate.
Editor’s Commentary
For people aware of the difference between sex and gender, it can be frustrating when they are used incorrectly. Republicans like to (inaccurately) claim that “there are only two genders.” This is never corrected by reporters or politicians on the Left who could say, “you mean ‘sexes.’’’
Sex is biological, and it refers to anatomical and physiological traits (such as chromosomes, hormones, and genitalia). Gender is a social and psychological concept that refers to someone’s internal identity and the cultural roles and behaviors that are expected in society.
When there’s an understanding of the meaning of these words, terms like, “gender-identity” and “gender-affirming care,” aren’t as “scary” to people who haven’t been exposed to a diverse population grew up in isolated rural areas where everyone in town is the same race, sexual orientation, etc. (“fear of the unknown”).
What we don’t understand, we fear. What we fear, we judge as evil. What we judge as evil, we attempt to control. And what we cannot control…we attack.
I’m not an expert, this is just my opinion.
When the state legislature overrode Democratic Governor Laura Kelly’s veto and passed Senate Bill 244 — a law that invalidates corrected IDs, authorizes $1,000 lawsuits against trans people for using public restrooms, and adds criminal penalties on top — the state had a ready-made list of people to target.
About 1,800 driver’s licenses were invalidated in the first wave. That’s roughly 10 to 20 percent of the estimated trans population in Kansas — the share who had legally transitioned on paper.
The rest are still out there, undocumented in the state’s files but no longer welcome in its public restrooms either.
Kansas is not an outlier. It’s a template.
The Pattern
In Indiana, Attorney General Todd Rokita paused the processing of gender amendment requests on birth certificates, a move that quietly handed his office an updated list of trans and gender-expansive people in the state.
The list reportedly runs to 1,558 names — a fraction of Indiana’s estimated 26,000 trans residents, but enough to be useful for whatever the state decides to do with it.
In Texas, the Department of Public Safety has been collecting data on trans Texans for the past two years, with the stated goal of reversing any gender marker changes already on file.
The list is shorter — under 200 names — because Texas didn’t compile retroactively. But the infrastructure is in place.
And in Tennessee, lawmakers went further than any of them. A new law signed this spring will create a public database of trans residents, built from medical transition records rather than identity documents.
Because more people transition medically than legally, the dataset is expected to be far more comprehensive than anything Kansas, Indiana, or Texas has produced. By December, Tennessee is set to release records covering all gender-affirming care provided in the state.
Florida, Missouri, and Idaho have moved in adjacent directions. As of February, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Tennessee, and Texas no longer allow trans people to update the gender marker on their driver’s licenses. Those states, plus Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Montana, refuse to update birth certificates.
Aleksandra Vaca, an independent journalist documenting the bills and policies targeting trans people across the country, told Prism Reports the strategy depends on staying invisible.
“The whole thing about surveillance is that it happens as long as people don’t notice. Only when Kansas started revoking people’s IDs did people start asking, ‘Wait a minute, how did they do this?’”
The Bills Behind the Lists
The data collection is happening alongside an unprecedented surge of anti-LGBTQ legislation.
As of February 9, the Trans Legislation Tracker counted 645 anti-trans bills introduced across the country in 2026, three of which had already passed and 17 of which had failed.
The ACLU’s parallel count of anti-LGBTQ bills sits just under 400. Whatever methodology you use, the volume is historic.
The bills that have already become law tell you where the movement is heading. Kansas SB 244, as described above. New Hampshire SB 268, which lets people and organizations classify individuals by “biological sex” in bathrooms, locker rooms, sports, and institutional settings — and explicitly says that doing so is not unlawful discrimination.
Wisconsin SB 146, which makes it a felony for anyone convicted of a violent crime to legally change their name, with criminal penalties for violations.
Idaho Governor Brad Little signed House Bill 752 into law, which criminalizes trans people for using bathrooms aligning with their gender identity — not just in government buildings, but in private businesses.
A first offense is a misdemeanor carrying up to a year in jail. A second is a felony carrying up to five years in prison.
Since 2022, at least 10 states have added new misdemeanor or felony penalties to laws targeting trans people and their support networks.
Jules Gill-Peterson, a historian of transgender legal history, told Prism that the current wave is not invented out of nowhere — laws dating back to the 1840s criminalized people for appearing in public “in a dress not belonging to their sex.”
Those statutes created what she described as a revolving door of arrests and short jail stays. Today’s bills are more sophisticated, more targeted, and backed by far more powerful surveillance tools, but the underlying logic is the same: make it a crime to exist as yourself in public.
What the Lists Are For
Civil libertarians watching this unfold have been careful to point out what state attorneys general and health departments will not. A list of people who have sought gender-affirming care, or who have changed a gender marker, is not a neutral administrative record. It is a roster of people the state has identified as politically inconvenient.
What happens to those lists matters enormously. They can be subpoenaed in custody disputes. They can be shared with federal agencies — and the Supreme Court has already allowed the State Department to stop processing passports with nonbinary gender markers or markers that differ from a person’s assigned sex at birth.
They can be used to deny employment, housing, insurance, and benefits. They can be released publicly, as Tennessee’s December rollout will demonstrate. They can be matched against other government databases. They can be obtained, legally or otherwise, by people who wish trans Americans harm.
In Indiana, where the attorney general’s office once attempted to brand the parents of trans children as “child abusers” to justify cracking down on gender-affirming care, the list-making serves an explicit political purpose.
In Texas, where Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office attempted in 2023 to compile names of everyone who had updated their state ID, the project has been ongoing and unapologetic.
For trans people in these states, the lists transform a private medical decision or a routine document update into a permanent flag in the government’s records. There is no way to remove yourself.
What comes next
The ACLU has filed challenges to Kansas SB 244 and is preparing further litigation. Advocacy networks have launched mutual-aid efforts — one organizing project, Operation Lifeboat, helps trans people relocate from states with the most aggressive surveillance regimes to states with stronger protections. Some families have already moved. Some can’t afford to.
What is being built across Kansas, Indiana, Texas, Tennessee, and the states moving in their direction is not a series of isolated culture-war policies. It is the architecture of a registry.
The bathroom bans, the document revocations, the medical databases, and the criminal penalties are not separate fights. They are pieces of the same machine, and that machine is now operational.
The question is no longer whether the United States will tolerate state governments keeping lists of their LGBTQ+ residents. Four states are already doing it. The question is what comes when the lists are complete?
