Kansas Lawmaker Objects to 'Huge Transgender Female' in Restroom
Kansas Reflector, which was the first media outlet to report the story.The trans woman referenced by Helmer is Rep. Stephanie Byers, a Wichita Democrat who in 2020 became the first out trans elected official in Kansas and the first Indigenous trans person elected to any state legislature. “It is quite uncomforting” to share a restroom with a trans woman, Helmer said in the email, adding that she considers trans people a threat.“We have a very unfair situation,” she wrote. “We as women have humans that are much larger, stronger, more adrenaline and testosterone and therefore possibly more dangerous and we have to share our restrooms.
Not only that but our wee little girls in elementary and middle and high school are having to be exposed and many have been raped, sodomized and beaten in the restrooms by these supposedly transgenders who may or may not be for real.” There is, of course, no evidence of any such assault.Byers and others expressed shock at Helmer’s rhetoric. “We know this has been going on in offices and back rooms and conversations since the day I was elected,” Byers told the Associated Press. “The shocking part is that it came out, that someone actually said it.” To the Reflector, she noted, “How embarrassing is it that this is the same argument that was said in the 1950s and 1960s about why you couldn’t have Black people in the same restroom — because they were predators. “And you know, that stigma carries on.
We still see it.”Tom Witt, executive director of Equality Kansas, told the AP that Helmer’s remarks constitute “a new level of toxic bigotry.” His group sent a letter to House Speaker Ron Ryckman Jr.
