The Green Study

I lay awake last night thinking about transgender people living in Kansas. Many of them received letters that their driver’s licenses were being revoked with no grace period to get new ones. Imagine waking up one morning and you were simply no longer allowed to drive. You couldn’t get to work or get groceries or take your children to school. You couldn’t use a bathroom in Target without someone trying to earn money by reporting you and suing. Welcome to Kansas, the state of SB244, the bathroom bounty bill.

This is the malevolent cruelty of conservatives at work. They direct a well-funded hate campaign against a small group of people and they expend time, energy, money, public spaces, and legislative power trying to destroy them. It’s evil. Beyond the material harm being done to human beings, they are using women as a shield to justify their bigotry.

Kansas Senate President Ty Masterson said that not passing this legislation “would have forced our mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters to share their bathrooms with biological men in government buildings.” Topeka Capital-Journal, February 18, 2026

The greasy gall of these people. Being evil in the name of women. And a lot of people, lacking self-awareness or introspection or exposure to any sort of diversity, have hopped on board the moral panic train, which apparently includes hapless women who will need fainting couches if a transwoman shows up in the bathroom.

Here’s where I’m coming from. I grew up poor, in a dysfunctional family with few healthy adult relationships modeled. I got my sex education from 1950s black-and-white films while sitting on the floor of my school gym. The rest came from explicit romance novels that I smuggled from my mother’s library. I thought love was a result of sex and sex was the result of being pretty, sexy, and agreeable. None of the things which were in my perview.

Gender-wise, I was sloppy, never feeling particularly feminine (although I tried) and envious of the masculine which always seemed cooler and more powerful. I’d only seen and understood power in its crudest form. And women and children did not have it. It was something that a depressive glasses-wearing, introverted, short girl really wanted. It seemed that the only paths there were to deny any feminine aspects of self or to play them to the hilt.

This is all to say that I made a whole lot of questionable choices before settling into the frictionless path of being what I looked like, and for the most part, felt like. Currently, I’m a cisgender middle class white woman in a heterosexual marriage. I am the parent of a girl (now woman). The challenges of learning how to trust and genuinely love another human, as well as growing a nuanced understanding of power, and seeing sex as merely one aspect of self, was a journey. It took a lot of mistakes (and a little therapy) but I arrived at a healthier place, in relationship to myself and to others.

Understanding one’s self, one’s path through the wilds of gender and sexuality, and questioning everything, is how you learn about the biodiversity of the human body and soul. I’m still learning and if there is anything that conservatives have done, it’s convinced me that the world is a better place for its diversity, in nature and in humans.

In my lifetime, I’ve had to pass through light years of evolution in the conversations around sexuality and gender. Wading into discussions about LGBTQ people feels very tentative. On occasion, I still mess up pronouns and conflate gender and sexuality. My daughter, raised in an era where discussions and declarations about sexuality and gender happened in middle school, rolls her eyes at me when I struggle with the singular they/them.

While I’m quick to apologize upon correction and try not to repeat mistakes, I always fear those unintentional cruelties I may inflict on people who have had to fight their whole lives just to be seen as who they are, inside and out. Trepidation is no excuse for ignorance, so I continue to learn, with many fearless voices and writers leading the way.

What I do know is that none of what is happening has done anything to advance the rights and safety of women. For people who need to be personally activated to care, what happens to LGBTQ people serves as the harbinger of what’s happening to women. Conservatives, including those who wear the facade of religious faith, are intent on turning everyone into easily categorized humans, because they have skipped the learning part of the journey, and gone straight to dogma and easy answers. They will continue to try and impose their mean little lives and beliefs on everyone else while picking our pockets clean.

I feel overwhelmed by the banality of evil. Which is, of course, the sturm und drang of the whole conservative project. They create tiny hells all over the country and while we’re looking away, they move the cups like a cheap street con, so we fail to see the money swept off the table into the coffers of a few.

That old canard “the more things change, the more they stay the same” seems more evident now than ever before. Every movement, every evolution, humans do the same song and dance. Progress and backlash. Find the scapegoat, start a war instead of doing the painstaking work of diplomacy, protect the powerful over the vulnerable, sacrifice pawns for money and power.

We’re being conditioned to believe that we cannot evolve, cannot change, cannot imagine a world where there is no intentional cruelty. Cynicism is easy. The challenge is embracing nuance and approaching everything with curiosity – and knowing that humans can be more than what we’ve been taught.

Administrative Notes:

To move beyond paralysis, there are a few things I try to do on a regular basis: donate funds when I can to the ACLU or MN rent relief (it’s still bad here due to ICE) or a local food shelf. I use 5calls.org to contact my reps regularly. Even though my reps are currently all Democrats, some are centrists (barely distinguishable from old school Republicans) and squishy on human rights for all. They need to be reminded.

Comments here are moderated, blocked, and reported as needed.

Resources

“Understanding transgender people, gender identity and gender expression” by the American Psychological Association

“How to be an Ally” by the LGBTQIA Resource Center

“Glossary of Terms: LGBTQ” by GLAAD

“What does the scholarly research say about the effect of gender transition on transgender well-being?” by Cornell University

Both/And: Essays by Trans and Gender-Nonconforming Writers of Color Edited by Denne Michele Norris

A Queer History of the United States by Michael Bronski

Assigned Media, Independent Journalism, Transgender News Website