Jordan Hanson, of Lawrence, is afraid that when she goes to the polls for the Aug. 5 primary, she will be turned away without being able to vote.

Hanson is a resident of Kansas who is older than 18, has registered to vote and has an official, government-issued photo identification card. The problem? The photo and the "sex" field on the ID, a Kansas driver's license, identify her as a man.

Hanson, a transgender Kansan, said she is loathe to let her gender identity be vetted by a random poll worker.

"My identification and my ability to vote should not be up to the subjective interpretation of anyone," Hanson said.

Tom Witt is the executive director of Equality Kansas, the state's main lobbying group for gay, lesbian and transgender Kansans.

Witt said Hanson is coming forward with a concern activists say is prevalent in the transgender community.

"For a lot of people their ID is months or years behind who they are, and that’s a very serious issue for people trying to vote within this new regimen," Witt said.

Witt said others have called his organization to ask about their voting rights, but "everybody is reluctant to be public about this, because there is no protection against discrimination based on gender identity in this state."

Kay Curtis is a spokeswoman for Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who spearheaded the voter ID laws.

Curtis said potential voters are allowed to present a second ID with a more current picture, that doesn’t have to be government-issued, such as a Sam's Club membership card.

Curtis also said a government ID on which the gender doesn’t match shouldn’t be a problem because the law specifically instructs poll workers to consider only the name and appearance.

"In the situation you described the first thing is that the ‘sex’ identification has no bearing when the person goes to the polls to vote," Curtis said. "It’s not something that’s looked at by the elections board worker."

Curtis said the law instructs poll workers to take into account physical changes when they assess a potential voter's ID.

The voter ID law specifically contemplates changes related to a voter's "hair color, glasses, facial hair, cosmetics, weight, age and injury." Changes in gender aren’t mentioned. The transgender question was brought up at a public hearing on the voter ID legislation, and Kobach's office issued a response to it and other queries on Jan. 24, 2012.

"County elections officers have been informed about the existence of transgendered individuals and have been advised to educate their workers about transgendered individuals," the response states. "K.A.R. 7-42-6 sufficiently allows for poll workers to take 'other physical factors,' such as a sex change, into account when assessing a photographic identification document."

But that reassurance didn’t match the on-the-ground experience of Stephanie Mott, a Topekan who leads the Kansas Statewide Transgender Education Project.

Mott said the first time she voted under the new ID requirements, she was still registered as Steven Mott, and her ID still listed her as Steven Mott, so she gave that name, knowing that all the poll worker was instructed to match was name and appearance.

"The poll worker said ‘Name?’ and I said ‘Mott,’ " Mott said. "She said ‘First name?’ and I said ‘Steven.’ Then she said ‘You’re not Steven,’ out loud to everybody within earshot. Then I had to explain to her I was transgender. Then I had to explain to her what that was."

Mott said being forced to "out" herself as transgender to everyone at the polling place was unpleasant but also something transgender individuals who haven't updated their IDs go through in other venues as well.

"Statistics show that when we present mismatched documents, 15 percent of the time we get turned away, 28 percent of the time we experience harassment and 3 percent of the time we experience violence," Mott said.

Hanson said the state's bureaucracy has made it more difficult to update her identification. She said the local Division of Vehicles turned her away when she tried to get a driver's license that listed her as a woman, telling her she needed to get her birth certificate changed.

She made a request for such a change to the Kansas Department for Health and Environment, but in response received only a short email from a agency attorney that such an amendment based on sex change was impossible because of a 2002 Kansas Supreme Court decision regarding the estate of Marshall G. Gardiner, whose potential heirs challenged his marriage to a transgender woman under the state's same-sex marriage ban.

Witt, who along with Mott lobbied for more protections within the voter ID law for transgender Kansans, said there are ways to get the gender field changed on Kansas state documents, but none of them are easy.

"Really what they should do, from my point of view, is it should be a lot easier for transgender people who are transitioning to get the ID for their appropriate gender," Witt said.