Reb Moti Reports on this Year’s Anti-trans legislation
On Tuesday, the hearings on this year’s anti trans bills – SB 63 in the Senate, HB 2071 in the House – were held. The bills impose a comprehensive ban on all gender affirming interventions for minors in Kansas. No surgeries of course (vanishingly few are performed across the whole country), no puberty blockers or hormones, no facilitating transition in any way. There’s a civil cause of action against health care providers who provide gender affirming care, and to us it seems like any social worker or teacher who calls a kid by their preferred name and pronouns could get sued. It’s very sweeping and basically will eliminate gender affirming care for minors in Kansas.
Our coalition managed to fend this off last year by the skin of our teeth, but two of the four Republicans in the House who voted to sustain the governor’s veto last year aren’t there anymore, and the national attitude toward these bills and against trans people in general has taken a decided turn for the worse, so we’ve been expecting to get tire tracks on our backs as they run this thing over us. And we were correct: the bills were heard Tuesday, kicked out of committee Wednesday, and voted on the floor, Wednesday in the Senate and Friday in the House. It’s obviously a super high priority – the most important issue facing Kansas, one might conclude.
The proponents were the usual mix of professional testifiers and rightist religious voices - a complete rerun of last year’s hearing. The opponents (all from Kansas, and all unpaid) filled the room. Despite the fact that the outcome of yesterday’s hearing was predetermined, and the majority’s determination to ram this thing through would remain completely unaffected by the words spoken, still the trans and trans-affirming community came out in numbers, and in passion. The opponent conferees treated the committee with respect (more than it deserved) and made their cases passionately and hopefully. Please listen to what we’re saying, they said, look at our lives, we’re telling you that what you’re doing will harm us. It was beautiful, and heartbreaking.
I have come to think of the queer community like the movie Pleasantville, where people go from black and white to color as they discover their passions, which are outside the realm of the cloistered, routine lives that they previously led. Queer people are what gives the world color, and the black-and-white people want to stop it – that’s what it comes down to.
There’s a lot I could say about the arguments, about how people who have never met a trans person are making decisions that will affect the lives of families throughout the state, about how they are vilifying a marginalized community in a way that opens them to danger in very real ways, and how we know where that leads (cf Niemöller). I’ve tried to educate myself but there’s a lot I don’t know about transness; I’m of the same generation as most of the legislators so the numbers and visibility of gender-nonconforming people is something I’ve had to get used to. But I know that rightwing legislators are the last people who should be deciding how other people live.
And I know that solidarity - that love - means standing with people who are in danger, even if you don’t understand them, even if you don’t necessarily agree with them or their choices. Jesus ministered to the marginalized, and so should we.