Medicine isn’t an area where advocacy should even be a consideration. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case.
Medicine should only be based on facts. Intervention should be as minimal as possible. Healthy tissue should never be cut, altered, or removed unless the process is required to reach a problem area–for example, removing healthy tissue to get at a tumor.
These days, though, that’s not always the case. Advocacy for several kinds of treatments – like gender-affirming treatments – has become commonplace. Kansas is trying to stomp the brakes on that.
A proposed ban in Kansas on gender-affirming care for minors also would bar state employees from promoting it — or even children’s social transitioning.
Teachers and social workers who support LGBTQ rights worry they will be disciplined or fired for helping kids who are exploring their gender identities.
They should worry. Teachers and social workers, regardless of their personal beliefs and lifestyles, have no business advocating any of this nonsense to other people’s children. That’s not the purpose of the schools, and it’s none of the teachers’ or social workers’ damn business.
Unfortunately, the Governor of Kansas is inclined to side with the teachers and social workers.
Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed the proposed ban, and top Republicans anticipated Friday that the GOP-controlled Legislature will attempt to override her action before lawmakers adjourn for the year Tuesday. Their bill appeared to have the two-thirds majorities needed in both chambers to override a veto when it passed last month, but that could depend on all Republicans being present and none of them switching.
Let’s hope for the override. Kansas voters, in the 2026 election, should remember their Democrat governor’s veto of this bill.
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These people have no business proselytizing for gender-affirming care for kids. This bill takes another interesting angle in barring this, as it would become illegal to not only conduct any gender-affirming care on state-owned property, but would also prohibit any organization receiving state funds (like schools) from such advocacy.
Other provisions of the proposed ban would prevent gender-affirming care from occurring on state property and prohibit groups receiving state funds from advocating medications or surgery to treat a child whose gender identity differs from their sex assigned at birth.
Brittany Jones, an attorney and policy director for the conservative Kansas Family Voice, said courts have consistently ruled that a state “has the right to direct what is being done with its funds.”
I’ll point out, once again, the ridiculousness of stating “…their sex assigned at birth.” Sex is innate, not assigned, and it is determined genetically, at conception. These are facts.
There’s another point to be made here; it’s not so much that a statehas a right to direct what is being done with its funds, but that the taxpayers have a right to direct what is being done with their funds. That’s why we have elections.
The Kansas legislature is taking the right path in this matter. No medical practitioner should be administering unnecessary treatments or procedures, but even more to the point, no teachers should be engaging in advocacy in an area in which they have no training and less knowledge. The teacher angle of this is particularly egregious; we used to be able to trust the schools with our children, and it’s become apparent in recent years that we may no longer do so.
Kansas is trying to address this, at least in part.