Kansas Senate President Ty Masterson recently affirmed that, with the Republican legislative majority even stronger after the 2024 elections, the leadership will bring back the push to ban transgender surgery on those under 18 years old.
The last effort to do so ended with a veto from Governor Laura Kelly and a veto-override attempt which failed by only two votes. So it’s reasonable, now that they have additional votes on their side, that the Republicans would try again.
Reasonable, that is, in terms of signaling. Is it reasonable in terms of substance?
The role of political signaling, as opposed to the usually unglamorous work of addressing policy substance, is a complicated one in democratic governance. It is not uncommon for voters to complain that those elected to represent them are spending their time on meaningless bills or resolutions that show their support for one cause or another, instead of getting down to the business of building actually substantive legislation.
Yet I sympathize with legislators who operate in a nationalized media environment, whose funding so often depends upon major interest groups and organizations that are focused on creating media messages which exist primarily to rile up or placate key constituencies.
A reasonable politician might well conclude that have to play the signaling game, if only to make sure they have the opportunity to also focus on the difficult matters that may concern them most.
That’s not to say that there aren’t members of the Republican super-majority in Topeka who, for a variety of reasons, may well be sincerely concerned by the prospect of someone under the age of 18 receiving gender modification surgery, and see banning such as a necessary action in the name of public health or morality. I’m sure some fit that description.
But I suspect most of our legislators actually understand that they are crusading symbolically against an almost non-existent concern.
There’s no evidence of any Kansas medical center ever performing gender transition surgery on a minor, and nationally the numbers are incredibly low: out of all gender-affirming surgeries in the United States in recent years, perhaps 2 out of every 100,000 were performed on a person between the ages of 15 and 17, and 1 out of 1,000,000 were performed on a person between the ages of 13 and 15. Beneath that age, the number is zero.
This pattern — when the data and the message don’t match — holds for many other issues as well.
The number of transgender athletes seeking to play sports competitively in the category of their chosen gender is tiny, yet everyone seems to have a story about some transgender woman with an unfair advantage at their child’s high school.
It’s the same for illegal immigrants, who are far more law-abiding than the rest of the population, yet every story about an undocumented resident who commits a crime will be shared over and over and over again.
On a certain level, one must simply accept this as a political reality: most people, lacking both the time and inclination to become experts regarding any given matter, depend upon — and make decisions upon — the conveying of key signals, whether involving law or morality or anything else. For those who do have expert information — often because they actually are one of the people being symbolically discussed (a person with sexual dysphoria, a Dreamer, or more) — the battle to call attention to the actual data, and introduce substantive arguments, is never-ending. But necessary, all the same.
About the author: Dr. Russell Arben Fox teaches politics at Friends University in Wichita.
