‘It’s painful.’ Kansas bill would ban transgender women from female designated spaces

Tammy Quayle’s daughter knew she was transgender for years, keeping her head down and shrinking into a corner when changing in male locker rooms.

Quayle told The Star Wednesday that her 24-year-old daughter from Wichita looks and expresses herself as a female — if she were to go into a men’s bathroom, she could get hurt.

Quayle’s daughter doesn’t have an ova — which a proposed anti-trans legislation would use to define who is a female — which Quayle said would ask her daughter “to be basically a second-class citizen in her own state” and submit to others’ definitions of what a woman is.

“I have seen firsthand how achieving the right to a legal gender recognition is crucial for transgender people to live behind a life of marginalization and enjoy a life of privacy and dignity,” Quayle said during testimony Wednesday.

Kansas lawmakers considered legislation at a hearing Wednesday that Quayle said would threaten her daughter’s ability to move through the world as a transgender woman. Among a string of anti-LGBTQ bills gaining traction in Kansas, two bills heard Wednesday placed the rights of LGBTQ Kansans in opposition to the rights of other Kansans.

One bill, the “women’s bill of rights,” seeks to protect cisgender women, or a woman whose gender identity corresponds with their assigned sex at birth, by barring transgender women from female designated spaces.

Another bill pits the interests of racial and ethnic minorities against LGBTQ Kansans by pushing for the elimination of racial covenants in housing while blocking local non-discrimination ordinances that include gender identity and sexual orientation.

The legislation has earned steep opposition from Democrats and LGBTQ rights advocates.

Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, criticized the legislation as mean-spirited. “It’s painful. And I really wish that the folks in the Legislature would recognize that, would be a bit more empathetic and cut it out,” she said.

The “women’s bill of rights” aims to define male and female and prohibit transgender women’s access to gendered spaces, including bathrooms, prison wards, locker rooms and domestic violence shelters. The bill is one of a series of anti-trans bills in both Kansas and Missouri.

Supporters, however, say the bill protects the sanctity of women’s sports and preserving single-sex spaces.

Riley Gaines, a former University of Kentucky swimmer who has repeatedly testified in favor of similar bills in other states, argued the bill would protect female athletes. Gaines objected to the presence of transgender athletes in women’s locker rooms.

“We were not forewarned about this arrangement, we were not asked for consent and we did not give our consent as women,” she said.

Gaines, who last year campaigned for then-Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt during his failed gubernatorial campaign, has also advocated for legislation barring transgender athletes from girls sports. A Kansas House committee voted Wednesday afternoon to advance a bill with that goal.

Other proponents argued that though men and women are legally equal, they are nonetheless fundamentally different and therefore must be separated in some instances.

“We must not be required to integrate males and females in settings such as prisons, athletic teams or domestic violence shelters where differences in female and male biology matter,” said Jennifer Braceras, director of the Independent Women’s Law Center, a conservative non-profit organization which has campaigned for the legislation nationally. Some transgender women in Kansas are held in the state’s women’s prison in Topeka, there have been no reported safety issues to other inmates.

But activists for the transgender community argued rights for women could be prioritized without attacking the rights of transgender Kansans, labeling the bill’s language as exclusive to intersex people.

Caroline Dean, a pastor at the progressive Plymouth Congregational Church in Lawrence, Kansas, said the legislation “weaponizes the rhetoric of rights erase protections for transgender people.”

“Someone transitioning to be a woman or to become a woman does not threaten me or take away any of my rights as a woman,” she said. “There’s no professional opportunity that I lose, no spaces I wouldn’t be willing to share with a transgender woman.”

Sen. Mike Thompson, a Shawnee Republican who is sponsoring legislation to restrict gender-affirming care, challenged opponents, noting that he knew “a number of women” who were uncomfortable being in restrooms with “biological males.” He asked those who gave testimony how many genders there were, how gender is defined and asked Dean what the Bible said about this issue.

Dean answered that there is theological evidence of gender multiplicity.

Other opponents of the legislation, such as the CEO of the Center of Daring Liz Hamor, argued the bill’s binary language erases the existence of intersex people.

“Nothing about humans is binary,” she said. “There are way more than two options for eye color, hair color, skin color, shape, personality, sense of humor — every characteristic that makes us diverse as humans has a number of expressions. So why then would one of the most important things about us humans be binary?”

A separate bill challenges local protections for LGBTQ Kansans, by tying a bipartisan effort to eliminate discriminatory housing covenants with a policy banning any non-discrimination ordinance that is stricter than state law.

Rep. Patrick Penn, a Wichita Republican who sponsored the bill, said the changes ensured localities were in line with state and federal standards.

But LGBTQ activists have spent years advocating for ordinances at the local level to prevent discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation by business and in housing.

“It pits the rights of select groups against the human rights of other groups,” Roeland Park Mayor Michael Poppa told lawmakers.

During Wednesday’s hearing in the House Local Government Committee, advocates and opponents of the legislation, including Poppa, spoke in support of helping localities eliminate discriminatory housing covenants but urged lawmakers to remove language on non-discrimination ordinances or address it in a separate bill.

“I will, essentially, on section 2, leave it to others to defend,” said Mark Tomb, a lobbyist for the Kansas Realtors Association who helped draft the bill.