In addition to the driver’s license provisions, the law bans transgender people from using bathrooms matching their gender identity in public buildings and creates a bathroom bounty hunter system allowing citizens to sue transgender people they encounter in restrooms for at least $1,000 in damages, including potentially in private restrooms. The bill takes effect immediately upon publication in the Kansas Register rather than the standard July 1 effective date—giving transgender Kansans just days between the override and the invalidation of their identity documents.
The consequences for noncompliance could escalate quickly. Under Kansas law, driving without a valid license is a class B misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine—though first-time offenders are more likely to face a citation and fine. A conviction, however, triggers an automatic 90-day license suspension. If a person drives during that suspension, they face a charge of driving on a suspended license, which carries a mandatory minimum of five days in jail. Kansas already requires county jails to house inmates by sex assigned at birth.
Better to save the time, money, and energy for getting folks out of Kansas and providing support for the ones still stuck there.
The bounty system goes through the civil courts and they can throw out frivolous suits as they please, so trying to gum it up with frivolous suits would be a lot more expensive than the benefits such a tactic would confer.
Draining the courts of resources is the entire point.
And no legal firm will waste their reputation on suits like that, so you’re stuck filing individually, spending hundreds of dollars just to waste a few seconds of an intern’s time.
For the amount of money it’d take to make that effective, we could just buy whatever legislation we wanted at the statehouse.