Kansas hearing on transgender kids was painful, harmful and unnecessary | Opinion

In the latest installment of I Watch This Stuff So You Don’t Have To:

Today, we’re looking at Thursday’s informational hearing on a bill pending in the Kansas Legislature that seeks to ban gender-affirming medical and psychological care for minors, and punish those who provide it.

It actually wasn’t as bad as I expected. And I’m truly puzzled as to why state Sen. Beverly Gossage, Eudora Republican and chair of the Public Health and Welfare Committee, felt it necessary to keep the witness list secret from the public and her own committee until the last minute.

In the event, Gossage allowed equal time for proponents and opponents of House Bill 2791.

At times, it was difficult to listen to the testimony from both sides.

The first witness, Chloe Cole, is a Californian who transitioned from female to male, and then re-transitioned back to female.

As a teenager, she underwent hormone therapy and breast reduction to appear more masculine.

It didn’t go well.

She has a pending lawsuit against the Kaiser Permanente health care system in California and now travels the country advocating for bills like H.B. 2791 in state legislatures and Congress.

“Today, I experience joint, back and pelvic pains, I have issues with atrophy, with my sexual dysfunction and pain, and the testosterone may have made me infertile,” Cole testified. “The skin grafts they created out of my areolas have become open wounds and I have to bandage myself every single day.”

Contrasting that was the lived experience of D.C. Hiegert, a transgender individual and lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas.

“Kansans have told you we do not want this bill, because we know it will cause serious harm, and I do not mean that in an abstract sense — people will die, families will suffer,” Hiegert testified. “The very care this bill attacks is the reason I’m alive and able to advocate for my fellow Kansans’ rights. I love Kansas and I’m proud to call it my home. I know countless trans Kansans that feel the same way. But bills like these tell us our state does not love us back.”

I’m tempted to agree with state Sen. Pat Pettey of Kansas City, the ranking Democrat on the committee, who protested the hearing as a waste of time.

“We have many more important issues like Medicaid expansion that we could be using our committee time for, so I want to voice my opposition to this,” she said.

She’s not wrong.

The hearing was practically a rerun of proceedings last year when the Republicans who dominate the Legislature pushed through a similar bill, which was vetoed by Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly.

The obvious motivation behind the Senate hearing was to accommodate the travel schedules of the professional out-of-state activists brought to Topeka to testify in a House hearing, also Thursday.

The Senate hearing was, as I said, fairly balanced. But in the end, it still sends a harmful message to LGBTQ children struggling to understand their identity and where they fit into society.

“We’re doing harm to these kids who have to keep hearing over and over that they aren’t worthy to be here,” said Amanda Mogoi, a Wichita nurse practitioner with more than 2,000 LGBTQIA+ patients, and Kansas’ only health care provider certified by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.

“This committee and the Legislature, over and over, tells children that they are not valuable and not worthy to make their own health care decisions and to say who they are, and to be believed,” Mogoi said.

That’s hard to argue with. These past few years, Kansas has gone far out of its way to marginalize and ostracize LGBTQ people, with transgender individuals bearing the brunt of the fiercest attacks.

It’s time to quit it, and learn to live and let live.

May Thursday’s hearing be the last spectacle of its kind.