Kansas Republicans are all about parental rights, on their terms
In Kansas, you can parent your children any way you like.
Just so long as you do that parenting like a conservative Republican.
That’s the message coming from Topeka these days, anyway. Just a few weeks ago, Attorney General Kris Kobach took a bold stand for the primacy of parental rights after it emerged that he had written to some of the state’s largest school districts to demand information on their policies regarding transgender students — and to warn districts that they must inform parents if their student present as trans or nonbinary at school.
Now, there is no state law requiring schools to trample on their students’ privacy in that matter. But Kobach asserted that the requirement can be found in the U.S. Constitution and Supreme Court rulings.
Schools that don’t inform on their trans students, he wrote to Kansas officials, are “in violation of the parents’ right to direct the care, upbringing, and education of their children.”
Which struck me as odd. My high school principal never called my parents to tell them about my raging heterosexuality. Why must we turn teachers — who are desperately, simply trying to teach kids how to read and write — into the gender conformity police?
But Kobach had a powerful argument, admittedly. You won’t find many Kansans who argue against the right of parents to, well, parent.
Unless they’re parenting the “wrong” way, it turns out.
That’s the upshot of a bill the Kansas Legislature sent to Gov. Laura Kelly last week, imposing a strict ban on transgender care for minors. There will be no gender therapy, no surgeries, no real genderaffirming care at all for young people.
Kelly will almost certainly veto the bill, like she did with similar legislation last year. That might not matter: This year’s bill passed with veto-proof majorities in both legislative chambers. Which means the ban will probably become law.
So much for the rights of Kansas parents to direct the care and upbringing of their children.
Listen, I have some small bit of sympathy for people who find themselves alarmed and bewildered by the sudden visibility of trans and nonbinary people over the last decade. Middle-aged folks like me grew up in a world in which — it seemed — men were men and women were women and you never really had to think about pronouns.
Now we’re finding out that the world isn’t what we thought it was. For some of us, that’s scary.
But the Republicans who dismiss the new prominence of transgender people as “somewhat
of a trend” — the words of state Rep. John Eplee of Atchison — are doing a real disservice to the parents of those children.
Kids don’t just stumble into gender-affirming care willy-nilly, after all. (And surgeries for people under 18, for what it’s worth, are exceedingly rare.) They almost always receive that care under the supervision of parents who might find the whole process somewhat bewildering, but who also love and work thoughtfully to do right by their children.
Often, a whole lot of tears are shed along the way.
The consciences of those parents — their morals, their right to make difficult decisions about their children — evidently don’t matter so much to Kansas Republicans.
The results can be darkly ironic.
State Sen. Mark Steffen, a Hutchinson Republican and anesthesiologist, last week compared genderaffirming care to the longdiscredited use of lobotomies to treat mental health issues. “It is our utter and complete responsibility to protect these children from being disfigured permanently via medications or surgery,” he said.
That jeremiad against irresponsible doctoring would be more convincing if Steffen hadn’t previously championed legislation allowing physicians to provide provably useless treatments such as ivermectin for COVID-19.
Such is the state of conservatism in Kansas. Quackery for us, rules for you. Parental rights are paramount, until they’re not. The only real consistency is that transgender kids must always pay the price.