The Right Wing Wants to Stop Adults From Being Trans
Knowles: ‘You have to ban transgenderism entirely’
Last week, Kansas Republicans in the House and Senate voted for three anti-transgender bills. One says that “biological differences” between males and females are “enduring” and ultimately “immutable,” i.e., those traits can’t be changed; another similarly defines sex by physical characteristics “present at birth”; a third says that physicians will lose their license if they provide gender-affirming hormones or surgery to anyone under 18, i.e., if physicians do the thing that the first bill claims is impossible to do. Those aren’t the only anti-transgender bills introduced in Kansas this year; they’re just the ones that passed last week.
The first bill is essentially a bathroom bill. It insists on the right to “single-sex spaces” that “ensure safety,” “allow members of each sex to succeed and thrive,” and are “substantially related to the important governmental objectives of protecting the health, safety and privacy of individuals.” Really, it means public bathrooms or any space anyone wants to mark as single-sex for any reason. Complying with a space’s designation as “single-sex,” according to the text of the bill, would require trans people to categorize ourselves based on the sex assigned to us at birth. Republicans call this bill the Women’s…
