By John Hanna
TOPEKA, Kan. — Kansas is banning transgender athletes from girls’ and women’s sports from kindergarten through college, the first of several possible new laws restricting the rights of transgender people pushed through by Republican legislators over the wishes of the Democratic governor.
The Legislature on Wednesday overrode Gov. Laura Kelly’s third veto in three years of a bill to ban transgender athletes, and came a day after state lawmakers passed a broad bathroom bill. Nineteen other states have imposed restrictions on transgender athletes, most recently Wyoming.
The Kansas law takes effect July 1 and is among several hundred proposals that Republican lawmakers across the U.S. have pursued this year to push back on LGBTQ rights. Kansas lawmakers who back the ban are also pursuing proposals to end gender-affirming care for minors and restrict restroom use.
The measure approved by Kansas lawmakers Tuesday not only would prevent transgender people from using public restrooms, locker rooms and other facilities associated with their gender identities but also bars them from changing their name or gender on their driver’s licenses. Kelly is expected to veto that.
“It’s a scary time to be raising a trans child in Kansas,” said Cat Poland, a lifelong Kansas resident and mother of three who coordinates a Gay-Straight Alliance at her 13-year-old trans son’s school about 40 miles (65 kilometers) northwest of Wichita. “We may face the very real threat of having to move, and it’s heartbreaking.”
The ban demonstrates the clout of religious conservatives, reflected in the 2022 platform of the Kansas Republican Party: “We believe God created man and woman,” and echoes many Republicans’ beliefs that their constituents don’t like any cultural shift toward acceptance.
“I wish it was 1960, and, you know, little Johnny’s a boy and Mary’s a girl, and that’s how it is, period,” Republican state Rep. John Eplee, a…
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