Today, Kansas state senators debated and passed a non-binding resolution encouraging the U.S. Congress to roll back the U.S. Department of Education's recent guidance about transgender students. The state is currently undergoing an education funding crisis that must be resolved by June 30 for public schools in the state to stay open, but instead of addressing this issue, legislators opted to spend the last day of their session on this non-binding resolution, which will actually harm students.
In response, NCTE Executive Director Mara Keisling said:
On a day when the students of Kansas desperately needed their legislators to act fast and save their schools from shutting down, Kansas senators opted instead to spend their time on a political charade, passing a non-binding resolution that amounts to nothing more than a symbolic attack on transgender children’s very existence. It’s wildly irresponsible for Kansas legislators to be more concerned about policing school bathrooms than keeping schools open at all. Their attempts to distract the public from the refusal to do their job by peddling hateful and baseless myths about transgender children makes this resolution even more shameful. The Kansas Senate has gone on record against the views of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Child Welfare League of America, and other experts on education and child health, all to stoke fears that have been proven false. We know some Americans still have questions about what it means to be transgender, but there are answers to those questions, and Kansas leaders have ignored them. Kansans deserve real leadership, not self-serving political grandstanding, and today the majority of its senators showed that they simply cannot deliver that.
