TOPEKA — Kendall Hawkins is the mother of a second-grader, works as a special-education teacher, coaches middle-school cross country and served in the Kansas Army National Guard.
She’s also a transgender woman who understands the harassment, assaults and hostility aimed at trans students by teachers and peers in schools across the state. She volunteers with GLSEN, which works to end discrimination based on gender identity and expression, and knows transgender students are scared. In the past two years, three in the Wichita area lost their lives.
The Senate Education Committee’s decision to consider Senate Bill 208, which bans transgender girls and women from participating in female sports teams from elementary school through college, could prove deadly.
“As a trans woman,” Hawkins said, “I understand and share many of the struggles transgender kids endure when one of them has lost the violence or suicide. I don’t just feel their loss. I experience it. I’m tired of standing up the candlelight vigils. I’m tired of burying trans kids. Why aren’t you?”
Natasha Chart, executive director of the Women’s Liberation Front in Washington, D.C., said the legislation opposed by Hawkins would help prevent unraveling of progress made the past half century with Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. The radical feminist organization, which considers the visibility of transgender people a “social contagion,” supports the Kansas bill mandating female student athletic teams only include members declared biologically female at birth.
“The fashion of allowing male students to compete in female athletics based on ‘gender identity’ claims puts this progress at risk by costing hard-working women and girls the opportunity to compete in fair and safe sporting competitions,” Chart said.
Fate of the Senate bill hasn’t been made clear, but support from House and Senate leadership could expand controversy beyond the Senate Education Committee’s one-hour hearing on the bill.
Emporia resident Ryann Brooks, the mother of a transgender child, said issues raised by the Senate bill were near and dear to her heart. Six months ago, her 12-year-old came out as transgender. She said her smart, funny and artistic daughter knew before she could vocally express that her physical body didn’t match her gender. Years of internal struggle had manifested into anxiety and depression, she said.
“When she finally told me, ‘Mom, I’m a girl,’ everything made sense,” Brooks said. “The smile I hadn’t seen in years has come back.”
She said the state of Kansas needed legislators to take on serious policy and financial challenges rather than devote energy to telling children they were less-than-kids that didn’t belong in sports activities.
Davis Hammet, a bisexual who began attempting suicide in the fourth grade rather than deal with a world that wouldn’t accept him, said the safety of children was placed at risk whenever the Legislature rolled out a bill targeting LGBTQ individuals.
There are death threats against children, he said, mostly issued by adults. Word of the bill will get around and kids will have to absorb the reality of state government officials actively working to exclude them from participation in athletics, he said.
“This bill is shameful,” Hammet said. “Passing such legislation would be a disgusting abuse of power exercised by government leaders against vulnerable transgender children. Further, subjecting all girls in Kansas to an invasive genital inspection procedure to play public school sports is bizarre and disturbing.”
