Why I fled Kansas for another red state

By Kit Jamison Young

The crisis happened slowly, then all at once, like the melting of a glacier. We couldn’t see what was happening until we were drowning.

“Dear readers,” began the message in trans journalist Erin Reed’s Substack chat. “I’m urgently trying to get in touch with trans activists and orgs in Kansas….”

It was January 28th, and my partner and I were about to head out for our once-a-month date night—a luxury we couldn’t afford but couldn’t quite give up. That night, though, we stayed in, stomachs churning.

Two days later, the full story dropped: Kansas Advancing Anti-Trans Bill Allowing Bounty Hunters to Patrol Private Business Bathrooms. 

With each headline, the situation worsened.

Kansas Legislature Passes Trans Bathroom Bounty, Drivers' License Revocations.

Kansas Sends Letters to Trans People Demanding the Immediate Surrender of Drivers' Licenses.

I had been living in Kansas for nearly eight years at that point, with a library card, my first close friend group since high school, and a job that paid just enough to support myself, my partner, and our beloved dog. My partner, for his part, was finally inching toward recovery from a mental health crisis that had landed him in the hospital for most of December 2023.

In moments of complacency, we thought about staying for good

There were positive signs: in 2022, voters rejected legislators’ efforts to remove abortion rights from the state constitution, and in 2025, the Kansas Supreme Court ordered the Department of Revenue to resume issuing IDs with updated gender markers. And it was in Kansas where I got the gender marker on my driver's license changed for the first time four years ago.

The woman at the DMV congratulated me when she slid my new ID across the counter. When I pushed through the double doors onto the parking lot, it felt like breaking the surface of a too-long dive, starving lungs, gorging on prairie air.

If I got pulled over, the mismatched gender on my license wouldn't serve as an invitation for the cop to give me a hard time. Airport security would no longer spend extra time scrutinizing the five o'clock shadow on my face while the line grew restless behind me. If asked to prove who I was, I could hand over this sleek little card as evidence. I felt immeasurably safer on that summer day in 2022.

Then the state started revoking trans people’s IDs in early 2026. If I couldn’t drive to work or navigate public spaces safely, then I couldn’t keep my little family afloat. So when my parents told me, “Come home,” I resisted—and then gave in. 

But I wasn’t escaping to a queer haven

My family is from southern Missouri, which has a lower gender identity score than Kansas on the Movement Advancement Project’s LGBTQ Equality Maps. Still, with a court order, you can change the gender marker on your ID, at least for now.

In the space of a week, I negotiated a temporary remote work arrangement while my partner ended our lease, and we packed our life into a U-Haul. Each day, I typed my driver’s license number into the Kansas Department of Revenue website to check the status of my driver’s license. The initial wave of revocations had missed me, but that could change at any moment.

Then, just days before we made the leap across the border from Kansas to Missouri, my phone blipped again.

“Missouri Advances Three Anti-Trans Bathroom Ban Bills in One Night.”

“F word,” my mom replied when I sent her a screenshot.

Why go to Missouri, a deep-red splotch in the middle of the map? 

It comes down to this: Kansas is the sixth least-expensive state in the U.S., and I’m paid just enough to get by there. I’ll have to find a blue-state job to afford blue-state rent, but I’ve been applying since January—to crickets. In the meantime, it’s better to be in Missouri with family than in Kansas alone, or so our reasoning went.

When I applied for a Missouri driver’s license the day after we arrived at my parents’ house, the clerk turned the screen toward me to approve my personal details.

The gender marker was an F. 

 I croaked, “The gender is wrong,” and the woman gently explained that it was left over from when I’d gotten my license at 16. I showed her my court order and the letter from my surgeon, and she changed it. 

When the new license was finally in my hands, the face in the photograph didn’t look like my own. Eyes raw, mouth flat, chin tilted at a defiant angle. Still, for the first time in weeks, I could breathe.

Then came my mom's diagnosis

Bathroom bills, IDs, and job applications were replaced by malignant neoplasms, lumpectomies, and radiation.

As it turns out, cancer doesn’t just bring a host of new problems; it also amplifies the ones that already existed.

Writing this now, several weeks after leaving our home in Kansas, I just received a drunk text from my mom threatening to make us move out (probably toothless, but I’ll find out in the morning). During the day, she says we are welcome, but at night, with a bottle or two of wine in her, things change. Since the diagnosis, it’s gotten worse. So we walk on tiptoes and tuck ourselves into corners, hoping there will be nothing to remind her of us as she sits ruminating in front of the TV. It’s hard to set boundaries when all the power is in someone else’s hands.

In moving from Kansas, I traded one type of instability for another. But this time, the precarity does not stem from transphobia; it’s rooted in the near-universal struggles of addiction, communication, cycles of hurting and being hurt—and sickness.

The thing about being trans is, it doesn’t exempt you from all the hard and painful milestones of real life. Instead, you’re forced to navigate them with one hand tied behind your back and a scarlet letter T on your chest.

Growing up, I wanted nothing more than to leave Missouri forever

Now, at 33 with rapidly aging parents, I sometimes imagine staying. Not in my parents’ house, but somewhere nearby, where I can escape the worst of the turbulence but still be around to drive my mom to her oncology appointments and climb the ladder to check the gutters for my dad.

But the start of the next state legislative session in January is my ticking clock. There’s little reason to believe the anti-trans bills that died this year will stay dead in 2027. I don’t plan to wait until I’m forced to run away again; I’ll find my way out first, one way or another.