Legislators in Kansas are actively trying to eliminate trans youth. They want to pass House Bill 2210, which would make it a crime for doctors to provide life-saving healthcare to transgender youth. These young people are members of our community and are just as deserving of basic human rights as anyone else. 

By criminalizing essential healthcare for a marginalized and vulnerable group, HB2210 also attacks the medical community by forcing doctors to go against the oath they swore to do no harm.

This is a matter of life or death. Together with my church community, I’m calling on Kansas legislators to do the right thing and oppose HB2210.

All children deserve love, acceptance, and the support of their families and communities. Too often, the voices of faith that we hear on these concerns don't espouse love. Not this time. Some want to carve out protections for religious freedom, because they wrongly assume that it’s a sin to be transgender. 

This is not the tradition of freedom and equality that abolitionists fought and died for to found the state of Kansas, and certainly not the position that we take at Plymouth Church, United Church of Christ.  

The proposed legislation tries to pretend that transgender people are not valued members of society. The role of the church is to love, support, and ally itself with all persons. Thus we condemn transphobic legislation in the strongest possible terms. Every Sunday, we state that “All are welcome” at Plymouth Church and we do not take those words lightly. 

We stand with the transgender community in demanding that the shared humanity of all persons be respected and that members of the legislature vote against this act which is based on hate and fear and, instead, promote the values on which our state was founded.