Obsessed Kansas lawmakers ban trans girls from sports. Score one for the bullies
When the recently arrested Kansas Senate majority leader Gene Suellentrop issued that ludicrously insufficient statement on Wednesday afternoon, saying only that he regrets distracting lawmakers from their important work, maybe you wondered, “What important work?”
Did his life-threatening alleged attempt to outrun the police while speeding the wrong way on Interstate 70 perhaps distract Kansas lawmakers from the important work of passing Medicaid expansion? That expansion, which would secure coverage for some 165,000 more Kansans, is just “not on the radar,” as Suellentrop said not long ago.
Was he distracting his colleagues from shoring up public schools, or getting guns out of the hands of abusers? No and no, of course. Or how about passing a bill to extend the statute of limitations to help assault victims? That one may not even get a hearing in the Kansas Senate this session.
Instead, they are working on one of their passion projects, which is marginalizing trans girls, while pretending to be “protecting” other girls from them, on the court and in the locker room.
“There have been 10 bills since ‘16 attacking transgender youth,” Kansas Sen. Cindy Holscher told us. “My understanding is that there are five transgender female athletes in Kansas,” said Holscher, a Democrat from Overland Park, so that’s two bills per girl. “We talk about mental health and preventing teen suicide, but here we are, attacking vulnerable people.”
On Wednesday night, the Senate voted to ban transgender girls and women from competing in school-sponsored girls sports. Now the bill goes to the Kansas House.
Sen. Virgil Peck, a Havana Republican, said it’s important to protect young women from having to share showers with biological males. That’s because he still believes in chivalry, he said, and still believes in standing up for God’s special creation, females.
“Have men given away our man card to the snowflakes? Are we going to allow someone to carry our manhood around in their fanny pack or in their purse? Are there no longer any alpha males” left to protect our daughters?
Certain daughters, he means. A decade ago, Peck made national news by musing in a committee meeting that maybe immigrants should be shot from helicopters, like feral hogs.
The protections young women and other humans really need are not from already often bullied trans girls, but from the known predators that lawmakers somehow believe should be able to keep their weapons.
Remember when conservatism was about personal freedom? Or does that only apply to the right not to wear a mask during a pandemic?