TOPEKA — Republicans scoffed in indignation last week when Senate Minority Leader Dinah Sykes tried to read the names of transgender children who died from suicide or murder in 2020 in the United States.
The Democrat from Lenexa violated the chamber’s rules on polite debate by referring to an effort to restrict participation by transgender children in sports as “crappy legislation.” Republicans leapt to their feet in protest.
Lawmakers are expected to be civil, even when responding to an attack on vulnerable children.
Days after the Legislature voted to send Senate Bill 55 to Gov. Laura Kelly, who is presumed to veto the bill, Senate President Ty Masterson chastised Democrats for sinking “to unprecedented levels of unrelated vitriol in their attempt to derail the bill.” He issued a joint statement Tuesday with Sen. Renee Erickson, a Wichita Republican who led debate on the subject.
Masterson and Erickson took offense at the implication that “actual lives would be lost” as a result of their legislation, an accusation supported by academic research.
The model legislation, written and promoted by anti-LGBTQ groups, has been introduced in numerous states this year. It requires public schools and universities to designate a gender for each sports team and limit participation based on an individual’s assigned gender at birth.
Republicans who support the bill say female athletes need protection. During debate, they drew numerous distinctions between the athletic achievements of men and women, but never compared cisgender girls to transgender girls.
In her closing remarks during Friday’s debate, Erickson defended the legislation by quoting from the biblical book of Genesis.
“‘Male and female He created them,’” she said. “May not agree with it — those are God’s words.”
Democrats characterized the effort to pass discriminatory legislation as a political ploy aimed at energizing far-right voters at the expense of just five transgender athletes in Kansas schools. They complained that the bill, even after amendments, would still subject children to genital inspections if there is a gender dispute. And they pointed to the possibility that Kansas would lose sporting events or business investments by embracing discrimination.
“I have little patience for conversations about civility or decorum during debates surrounding legislation that targets five transgender children learning how to dribble a ball and pass to their classmates,” Sykes said in response to the statement from Masterson and Erickson. “The extremists pushing this legislation are so clouded by their own self-righteousness that they cannot see the long-term consequences this legislation will have on our state.”
“Most importantly,” Sykes added, “kids who don’t fit the rigid mold of how these leaders think they should live will add it to their list of reasons they don’t belong, and some of them will heartbreakingly decide they can’t live in a world rooting against them every day. I am unwilling to let any of those kids think for a moment that I’m not on their side, no matter how crass my colleagues may think that makes me and my fellow Democrats.”
Masterson and Erickson blasted the NCAA for suggesting a basketball tournament could be removed from Wichita if the bill were to become law.
“Republicans in the Kansas Senate will not cower in the face of such intimidation and inflammatory rhetoric,” Masterson and Erickson said. “We will not back down in defense of fairness in women’s sports. We will not sell out decades of progress by women for a few days of a basketball tournament. We will continue to engage in this debate with scientific facts, civility, and respect.”
Sen. Mark Steffen, a Hutchinson Republican, indicated in a column he wrote for the Hutchinson News that the Family Policy Alliance of Kansas was influential in the effort to pass the bill in Kansas. When the lobbying group says to jump, Steffen wrote, “I ask how high.”
