(LifeSiteNews) – Kansas District Judge Teresa Watson reaffirmed Monday that state drivers’ licenses must denote actual biological sex rather than “gender identity,” ensuring gender-confused Kansans cannot change their designation on official identification.
Last July, Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach sued Democrat Gov. Laura Kelly for refusing to follow and enforce a state law that took effect that month that established a biology-based definition of “woman” which “(a)ny school district, or public school thereof, and any state agency, department or office or political subdivision that collects vital statistics” was bound to correctly record.
Watson agreed, deeming the issue a “public safety concern” and noting that government-issued licenses “are used by law enforcement to identify criminal suspects, crime victims, wanted persons, missing persons and others.”
Not content to abide by the decision, the left-wing American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) argued that the Kansas Supreme Court’s 2019 ruling in Hodes & Nauser v. Derek Schmidt, which asserted a right to “bodily autonomy” protecting abortion, also meant Kansans had a right to change their official identities.
Now, LGBTQ Nation reported that Watson deemed that argument an “unreasonable stretch.”
“Hodes said Kansans have the right to control their own bodies,” she wrote. “It did not say Kansans have a fundamental state constitutional right to control what information is displayed on a state-issued driver’s license.”
“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 of what he called this “victory for the rule of law and common sense.”
It is an article of progressive faith that gender is no more than a matter of self-perception that individuals are free to change at will. But according to modern biology, sex is not a subjective sense of self but an objective scientific reality, established by an individual’s chromosomes from their earliest moments of existence and reflected by hundreds of genetic characteristics. For Christians, the issue is further settled by Genesis 1:27, which teaches that God created both sexes in His image.
Yet for years LGBT activists have worked to promote “gender fluidity,” the idea that sexual identity is separate from biology and discernible only by personal perception, across public education, libraries, health care, and cultural traditions such as beauty contests, school homecomings, and athletic competitions.
Critics say their efforts have yielded a wide array of harms, both to the physical and mental health of gender-confused individuals themselves as well as to the rights, health, and safety of those who disagree, such as girls and women forced to share intimate facilities with males, female athletes forced to compete against biological males with natural physical advantages, and individuals forced to affirm false sexual identities in violation of their consciences, their understanding of scientific fact, and/or their religious beliefs.
The Sunflower State’s divided government has seen numerous conservative policies rejected by Kelly only to be forced into law by GOP super-majorities. Kelly has previously been overridden on laws to guarantee medical care to infants who survive abortions and keep males out of female-specific athletic programs.