There’s a reason Kansas and Missouri lawmakers are attacking trans kids right now | Opinion
It’s anti-transgender week in the Kansas Legislature. Lawmakers are holding hearings on three bills aimed at ostracizing the state’s transgender residents.
First up was HB2238, which received a public hearing in the House Committee on Education on Monday. It would require students at public high schools and universities to play sports associated with their “biological sex,” at least if that’s male. In other words, no one who has transitioned to female would be allowed to play in female leagues. Strangely, lawmakers are less concerned about athletes identified as female at birth playing in male sports.
No grave threat to Kansas justifies the bigotry masquerading as protecting young female athletes. According to testimony at Monday’s hearing, there are only two girls registered with Kansas State High School Activities Association to whom the bill might apply. If they were out there breaking records, as one speaker at the hearing noted, it would be front-page news.
Supporters don’t care. It’s possible that someday a young athlete born a girl might not get to play because someone who was identified as a boy at birth takes a spot on a team. They point to isolated incidents in far-flung states.
Those incidents are real, and there are nuances to the issue, but it’s not the Kansas Legislature’s job to solve them. KSHSAA, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the International Olympic Committee and other organizations that oversee athletics already are grappling with how to maintain fair competition among transgender athletes. They are the experts, and they are adapting. They don’t need lawmakers meddling.
The cost of that meddling is high. Bills like this send a powerful and awful message to young Kansans coming to grips with their gender identity: You are not welcome to participate fully in your own state.
Briana McGeough, an expert on LGBTQ mental health in the School of Social Welfare at the University of Kansas who specializes in working with LGBTQ youth, testified on Monday: “This bill has the capacity to harm transgender youth who aren’t even interested in participating in sports because it serves to codify stigma and discrimination against transgender people. These kinds of bills in other contexts have been linked to increased risk for depression, anxiety and (risk of suicide) among transgender people.”
The Kansas Division of Budget in its fiscal analysis of the bill warns about other problems. There almost certainly would be a lawsuit that sucks up state resources. The NCAA could choose not to host events in Kansas.
The bill sends a message: Don’t come to Kansas if you don’t conform to our antiquated, scientifically invalidated views on gender.
To top off the pointlessness, Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed a similar bill last year. The Legislature lacked the votes to override her veto.
Drag shows, personal pronoun choice targeted
Two more anti-transgender bills have hearings this week. SB233 would let Kansans sue doctors who provide gender affirming medical treatments and revoke those doctors’ medical licenses. SB180 would require public agencies to identify people only by their “biological sex, either male or female, at birth.”
This isn’t really just anti-transgender week in Topeka. Conservative Kansas lawmakers will punch down on the state’s LGBTQ residents for months with a half dozen anti-LGBTQ bills targeting drag shows (SB201 and SB149), students’ personal choice of their pronouns (SB207) and more.
Nor is the bigotry limited to Kansas. Lawmakers in Missouri and Oklahoma are considering dozens of their own anti-LGBTQ bills. Indeed, Missouri lawmakers hope to one-up Florida with arguably the harshest “Don’t Say Gay” bill yet. One might almost suspect that there’s a coordinated national attempt to create hysteria among Republican voters over an LGBTQ bogeyman.
One would be right.
At the October 2017 Values Voter Summit, an annual strategy session of the arch-anti-LGBTQ Family Research Council, activist Meg Kilgannon outlined a “divide and conquer” strategy to target transgender Americans’ rights. “For all of its recent success, the LGBT alliance is actually fragile,” she told conference attendees, “and the trans activists need the gay rights movement to help legitimize them. Gender identity on its own is just a bridge too far. If you separate the T from the alphabet soup, we’ll have more success.”
Anti-LGBTQ bills introduced in almost every state’s legislature have striking similarities. Most won’t pass, though in states such as Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma, they have a better chance, given the partisan composition of those legislatures. They are part of a national push to gin up fear over nonexistent threats and to marginalize a vulnerable community. Surely lawmakers have more important work to do.
This story was originally published February 15, 2023 at 5:00 AM.