In the past month, Lawrence High junior Luci MacMillan and her family have switched her healthcare provider to one in another state, legally changed her name, and have considered leaving the country.
Fears over new legislation adopted in February have scrambled lives for many gender queer minors in Kansas. Senate Bill 63 prohibits doctors from providing treatments that include hormones, puberty blockers and certain surgical procedures to people younger than 18 who identify as a gender different from the sex they were assigned at birth. Kansas physicians who provide gender affirming care to younger patients now risk losing their medical licenses, effectively ending access to treatments for teens and younger people in the state.
“It’s pretty awful, honestly,” MacMillan said. “It kind of sucks to be dehumanized to such an extent that laws ensuring my protection and medical care are disregarded. It feels pretty bad to not be recognized as a person by the state.”
School social worker Carrissa Welsh worries about the law’s effect on students’ mental wellbeing.
“It’s very concerning because even the talk of it being introduced and things is telling young people that may be transitioning or may be thinking, ‘I don’t feel like I’m in the right body’ or whatever it is, that they’re not worth anything,” Welsh said. “I think this will be harmful. I don’t want to see suicides go up. I don’t want to see mental health struggles go up.”
The Kansas House and Senate votes overturned the veto of Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat. Rep. Susan Ruiz, a Shawnee Democrat, voted against the bill, explaining her vote on the House floor.
“I believe many of you feel that in your heart that you are protecting kids; you are misguided,” Ruiz said. “To the young trans youth community in Kansas, we try to find ways to make this bill less harmful. So far we have not succeeded. I’m sorry that you have been used as unwilling actors in this political theater.”
Advocates for the legislation say it was needed to protect young people. Rep. Angela Stiens, a Shawnee Republican, said she was worried about the long-term impact of treatments for gender dysphoria on minors.
“We know children and adolescents lack the emotional and cognitive maturity to consent to treatment that may have lifelong consequences,” she said in a speech from the House floor.
Regardless of health concerns, MacMillan says beyond the physical and mental effects, the fact they were allowed to receive medication was validating for them.
“Estrogen has given me basically a female puberty, which has been nice,” MacMillan said. “Even if nothing physically changed about me, and nothing mentally changed about me, the fact that I am being recognized as a woman and as someone that is non-binary, is incredibly meaningful to me.”
Losing the ability to receive gender-affirming care in Kansas, MacMillan has had to make changes in their process to receive the routine medication.
“I now have to go out of state in order to get the puberty blocker I’m on as well as prescription medication for estrogen, stuff like that, which is an annoyance at best and at worst, it’s an omen of things to come,” MacMillan said.
In response to the law’s passage, school board president Kelly Jones released a column with The Lawrence Times, discussing USD 497’s perception of the law and how it concerns schools.
“It is unkind and unjust to compromise a child’s well-being for a person’s own political gain, which most certainly is the fuel for the onslaught of anti-trans legislation. We know that the increase in anti-transgender bills and executive orders is pervasive in public discourse,” Jones wrote.
Jones said the legislation “essentially legalizes bullying.”
“At the board table, my board colleagues and I consider what the debate around these bills must feel like for a 15-year-old transgender kid trying to make sense of it,” she wrote. “Why do that to them? We endeavor to support at least part of the antidote — a school community where they can come and just be themselves and study.”
Welsh is bracing for the impact of the law at Lawrence High, but she affirms that the doors of the mental health team are always open.
“My job is to support you in your mental health and where you are. And I just worry about the messaging that’s out there that’s saying you don’t belong because you do,” Welsh said. “Just come talk to someone and we’ll let you cry, we’ll let you talk, we’ll figure out how to get you through that school day, whatever it is, but I will not stop being a supportive adult.”
