photo by: Contributed

David Brown is a Lawrence attorney who has worked with the LGBTQ community in Lawrence since he opened his law office in 1992.

A new law targeting transgender Kansans is set to go into effect on July 1, and Lawrence attorney David Brown — calling it dangerous, cruel and ignorant — is determined to do everything in his power to stop it.

The law, often referred to as the bathroom bill — a misnomer, Brown said, because it restricts so much more than restroom use — requires that when a regulation applies distinguishing men’s and women’s areas, whether bathrooms, locker rooms, dressing rooms, prisons or other locations, people have to use the facility that accords with the biological sex noted on their birth certificates. Not only that, Brown said, but it also outlaws changing one’s gender marker on a document like a birth certificate or driver’s license, forcing trans people to forsake their identities.

In just 24 hours after the Kansas Legislature overrode the governor’s veto Thursday, creating the new law, numerous clients had contacted Brown expressing fear and confusion. One client, he said, told him that she was moving to another state to escape the “danger” that she felt was imminent.

“I’m living under a cloud of fear,” the client told Brown, who noted that the client had bought a house here “just two months ago” but felt forced to leave for her personal safety and well-being.

“I’ve talked to parents who are thinking about withdrawing their children from schools,” Brown said. “I’ve got calls from people who want to rush through their name change and gender marker changes. I mean, all this in the last 24 hours.”

Even before Thursday’s veto override, Brown said, transgender clients mentioned to him that they no longer felt safe in Kansas, where legislators have targeted trans athletes and gender-affirming health care among other issues affecting the LGBTQ community.

One client of Brown’s is moving to Spain; another is going to Mexico, he said.

For those who don’t have the resources or desire to move, “it’s a very dark time,” Brown said.

One reason the law is “literally endangering a whole group of people,” he said, is not just because it takes away rights — an equal protection violation, he says, and a violation of Foster v. Andersen, a federal case that allowed people to change their gender markers — but also because no one really understands what enforcement of the new law will look like.

“The law doesn’t really provide those answers,” he said. “What I envision is some self-described vigilante type person will go, ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ and report it to police to try and get people arrested … But the law doesn’t have anything in it about penalties, so there is a lot yet to be determined.”

While many supporters of the law may have been acting on outright LBGTQ-phobia, many are operating out of plain ignorance, Brown said — not even contemplating what the law might mean for federal education dollars, Title IX compliance and other ramifications.

“I don’t think the full impact of that law is fully understood by anybody, including the legislators who voted for it,” he said. “This anti-LGBTQ movement has horrendous effects for all sorts of people.”

Education is Brown’s goal, which he hopes will culminate in the form of a legal injunction that will prohibit the law from going into effect. To that end, he is attempting to assemble a group of attorneys, hopefully including the ACLU, which opposed the law, and any “folks who can actually spend the time” before July to make the case that the legislation is discriminatory, unconstitutional and should be struck down.

“I think there are about 10,000 people in Kansas who are self-identified as trans (based on Gallup Poll figures from 2020), and there are lots more folks who don’t come out as being trans,” Brown said. “It is impossible to underestimate the fear these people have, or the realistic nature of the threats. I mean, they’re attacked on the streets. The kids are assaulted and harassed in schools.”

And it’s become painfully clear since Thursday’s legislative action, he said, that even darker days have arrived.

Kansas House Speaker Dan Hawkins, a Wichita Republican, told GOP colleagues after Thursday’s override that he was “just giddy” about the legislation targeting transgender people — legislation that Republicans have dubbed the “Women’s Bill of Rights,” which Brown called another misnomer.

“They’ve taken people who had protection and removed protections … in the guise of protecting women, and they’re not protecting women. There’s nothing in this bill that protects women,” Brown said.

Brown opened his Lawrence office more than 30 years ago and has been working with the LGBTQ community ever since. Things “were not great” back then, in 1992, but he said in some ways they’re even worse now.

“We were hopeful that the governor’s vetoes would not be overturned,” Brown said. “But now that they have been, we need to act; we can’t just stand by. We have to do something.”