As Kansas Legislature victimizes transgender kids, I raise my voice in protest: This is not OK

Decent human beings do not further their careers by picking on already marginalized children, youths, and young adults. I feel like we can all mostly agree on that. But it seems that this common decency gets forgotten in a bid to be right or to win in today’s political climate.

This is not a political problem. This is not a Democratic versus Republican problem. This is not a red state vs. blue state problem. This is a human problem. This is a problem that hurts people in our communities. Watching politicians try to further their careers by targeting some of our most vulnerable neighbors and family members is gross. It is heartbreaking. And it is wrong.

Conservative advocacy groups note that anti-trans messaging is a political winner. And it looks like they have decided winning politically is worth any cost.

According to a report by AdImpact, the Republican party spent more than $220 million on trans and LGBTQ+ attack ads during the 2024 campaigns.

But the cost is not only in dollars. This culture war is not victimless. Our children, neighbors and family members are in danger, their safety and even lives put at risk due to rhetoric and policies from our politicians.

Merriam-Webster defines transgender as “a person whose gender identity differs from the sex the person was identified as having at birth.”

A transgender person is simply that — a person. A person with hopes and dreams. A person who goes to work or class every day. A person who lives their life. A person who is struggling to find their identity and place in the world just like the rest of us. A person who is someone’s child, someone’s grandchild, someone’s neighbor and someone’s best friend. A person who deserves to be treated with the same respect and care as anyone else in our lives.

To hear all the ads and sound bites, it is easy to believe the transgender population must be large. In reality, the number is low: Between 0.5% and 1.6% of American adults identify as transgender nationwide, with slightly higher numbers in younger age groups. That means maybe one person in 100. I don’t know about you, but knowing all the money and ads target just one person makes the tactic feel meaner to me.

To make it worse, those attack ads portrayed our neighbors and friends as a dangerous “other” group to be singled out and bullied. The simple fact is that a shockingly low number of people in our communities are under attack by our elected politicians. No amount of political posturing makes that less mean or more acceptable.

There is no political mandate for this meanness. The final presidential election result was close and no landslide. The numbers break out to slightly less than 50% for the two main parties nationwide (49.9% and 48.3%, to be exact). This doesn’t count people who did not vote. Numbers in Kansas skewed higher (57% to 41%), but that is a discussion for another day.

Depending on where you live in the country or the state, roughly half the people you see in the grocery store or at work or at a school program did not vote to attack marginalized people in our communities. And I’d like to believe that even a person who voted red up and down the ballot expects basic human decency from their elected officials. I’d like to believe that my neighbors do not condone the posturing and bullying we are witnessing. I’d like to believe we will all speak up and protect the vulnerable in our communities.

But the number of anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ sound bites and proposed laws in the past year are staggeringly high and the public outcry against these attacks vanishingly low. Believe me when I say that our youth and young adults absolutely notice this happening. The number of contacts to the Trevor Project crisis hotline spiked 700% after the election. The Trevor Project is a nonprofit organization that focuses on suicide prevention for LGBTQ+ people under the age of 25.

It feels like only a matter of time before all of the attacks lead to more pain for already marginalized members of our community unless we start to respond. I’m doing my part — speaking up even if my voice shakes — and I hope you will too. In the meantime, I hope it is not someone you or I love who loses their life to further a politician’s career or add to their social media likes.

And I hope it is not someone any of us love who turns to violence because they believe the lie that their neighbor or their family member is less than them.

Tamara Moots lives and works in Manhattan. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.