LGBTQ+ Kansas Citians will converge on Theis Park this weekend for drinks, drag shows and a parade at PrideFest. But a recent survey paints a darker picture of how life looks for the city’s transgender community.
“I’ve been misgendered and laughed at by officers when trying to report a crime,” one person wrote.
“I avoid (homeless) shelters because they aren’t safe for trans people,” wrote another.
A fifth of the survey’s respondents said they had been homeless at some point in their lives. A majority did not feel comfortable calling the police.
And that was before President Donald Trump returned to office in January. Since then, a flurry of restrictive bills from the Missouri General Assembly and executive orders from the White House have pushed some transgender Kansas Citians to consider fleeing the state — or country.
The survey was part of a needs assessment requested by the Kansas City Council in June 2024 to help the council find a way to support transgender residents. A year later, the city has put together a draft of its findings.
The needs assessment includes about a dozen policy recommendations, including hiring staff at City Hall to help trans residents navigate their health care, requiring trans-friendly policies at city-funded homeless shelters, expanding police oversight and creating a trans health care fund to help cover medical expenses.
None of those recommendations will become law until they are proposed and approved by the City Council.
Advocates and city officials are glad that the city now has a formal study that validates feedback they’ve heard for years. But issues along the way have tested the city’s relationship with some trans leaders, who are urgently calling for Kansas City to put money behind its promise to support the trans community.
What does the transgender needs assessment say?
The study is divided into four sections: health care, housing, public safety and employment. The Beacon obtained a draft version through a Sunshine Law request to Kansas City.
Some key findings include:
- About one in 10 respondents had experienced housing discrimination.
- A fifth had experienced homelessness, including a tenth who had been homeless at some point in the past five years.
- Nearly three-quarters of respondents know someone who had been misgendered or disrespected by the police.
- About one in four felt unsafe or were denied assistance during a negative interaction with a police officer.
- A majority — 57% of respondents — had experienced workplace harassment or discrimination.
The survey got responses from 348 people. A third of the respondents identified as nonbinary, a quarter were trans women and another quarter were trans men.
White people were heavily represented in the survey, at nearly 90%. Only 7% were Hispanic or Latin American, and less than 5% were Black.
Compare that to the total population of Kansas City, which is 58% white, 12% Hispanic or Latino and 26% Black. (The racial mix of transgender people tends to mirror the overall population.) Slightly less than 1% of the U.S. population, about 2.3 million people, identify as transgender.
Based on the survey responses, the study recommended about a dozen steps that the city can take to help. Those include:
- Hiring a “trans health care navigator” at City Hall who can help transgender Kansas Citians schedule appointments. It also recommends creating a financial assistance fund.
- Creating a full-time position exclusively focused on LGBTQ+ equity. (Kansas City currently has a LGBTQ+ liaison, but that role often takes a back seat to his primary job duties as the city’s creative director.)
- Requiring staff training and trans-inclusive policies at shelters that receive city funding.
- Financial aid for transgender residents facing eviction.
- Mandatory trainings for KCPD officers.
- Requiring that city contractors have inclusive hiring policies.
The needs assessment is still in draft form, and Jared Horman, Kansas City’s creative director and LGBTQ+ liaison, said that the city will likely host focus groups to get community feedback before finalizing the policy recommendations.
“The value here isn’t in novelty, it’s in validation,” Horman said in an email. “We now have formal documentation that supports what the community has been saying all along, and if that gives our community a stronger foundation to push for real, sustained action, we’ll take that as a win.”
A City Council member will need to sponsor an ordinance and get it passed by the council to follow any of the recommendations.
Councilman Johnathan Duncan, who sponsored the original resolution requesting the study, said he feels urgency to take action. He represents the 6th District, which covers southwestern portions of the city.
Out of the recommendations, he said hiring trans health care navigators seemed like an easy step that the city can take immediately.
Duncan said he is concerned with the lack of diversity among survey respondents, but at the same time, transgender Kansas Citians have been asking the city to step up for years.
“This assessment is imperfect, and also, it’s time to do something,” he said. “We could analyze and assess until the cows come home. But I think people — especially members of the trans community — are ready for the city to act.”
Funding could be an issue. Kansas City has very little wiggle room in the budget that the City Council approved in March. And Moody’s Investors Service warned in March that pulling additional money from the city’s reserves could result in a downgrade of its credit rating.
Kansas City as a ‘safe haven’ for transgender residents
Trans leaders have been calling on Kansas City to support the trans community for years.
Merrique Jenson, the executive director and founder of Transformations, a nonprofit that supports and advocates for trans women of color, said she has lost trust in the city’s stated desire to be a “safe haven” for trans people.
For her, this started in 2023, when Kansas City hosted a town hall for Transgender Day of Visibility. At that event, she said, plenty of trans people were telling city leaders in attendance exactly what they needed and what action steps the city could take to support them.
“Things were only going to get worse” for trans people, she said. “And we made that really clear. I made that really clear with the mayor and with city officials.”
But as attacks from Jefferson City and the White House have escalated, she said, Kansas City has not followed up with any material action, aside from a resolution declaring the city a safe haven.
So last year, Jenson, with other trans leaders, put together a road map with a $695,000 budget for social services to support transgender Kansas Citians. That included health care navigators, violence intervention specialists, youth street outreach, a mobile trans health clinic and consulting fees for trans subject matter experts.
She was told that the money was approved. But that turned out to be a mistake.
Instead, she learned, the City Council wanted to do its own research before devoting any money to the trans community.
That research would be led by cisgender city staff, without any funding to compensate community partners. Despite her frustrations, she worked with the city on the needs assessment, including more than 60 hours of volunteer labor.
And now as Kansas City is wrapping up that study, she said it lists much of the same feedback trans community members had already given at that town hall two years ago.
“I don’t think we need another report,” she said. “We need a budget, we need paid positions and we need a government that stops treating trans survival as a PR opportunity and starts treating it as a mandate.”
Lessons learned
Duncan and several LGBTQ+ advocates said they want Kansas City to regularly engage with the trans community to update the needs assessment every couple of years or even multiple times per year.
James Moran, a spokesman for OurSpot KC, which provides housing and support groups for LGBTQ+ youth, said continued engagement is especially important given the rapidly escalating attacks on trans people.
“This is not a problem that goes away just because we do one study once,” he said. “The constant evolution, especially when it comes to the trans community, requires consistent and regular visiting of those topics.”
Duncan said future versions should make a greater effort to reach people the study missed this time. He supports making the needs assessment recurring.
“We always should be going back out,” he said, “and asking the question, ‘Who’s not represented at this table?’”
The most obvious answer to that question, in this case, is Black and brown trans people.
But in addition to that, Jenson said the survey was missing important questions.
The survey didn’t ask about survival sex work, for example, which many poor trans women rely on because so few employers are willing to hire them.
It also didn’t ask whether respondents had ever experienced violence at the hands of police officers. Kansas City made national headlines in 2019 when two police officers were charged with assault for slamming a Black trans woman named Brianna BB Hill into a sidewalk and kneeling on her face.
JD Besares, the chair of Kansas City’s LGBTQ+ Commission, said future versions of the study need to have funding to do real community engagement work. The commission, he said, currently has no money allocated in the budget.
If they had been able to offer stipends or gift cards in exchange for completing or distributing the survey, Besares said, they would have been able to reach more people who weren’t already engaged with the city.
“We just really need more financial commitment from the city to be able to do these things,” he said.
(Notably, Transformations’ proposed $695,000 budget last year, which was turned down by the council, included $5,000 earmarked for a needs assessment.)
Jenson believes that Kansas City has a moral obligation to support the trans community — not only because it’s needed, but because the city made a public promise to be a “safe haven” for trans people in search of a safe place to live.
She said the city’s inaction over the past two years has rekindled some of the experiences she had trying to find safety as a child.
“There’s one thing when you come from a place that is already violent, and you escape that,” she said. “But then when you have other people promise that they’re going to keep you safe … and then they don’t do the basics on anything, that’s a different type of violence that I think hurts a lot more.”
She pointed to a recent study that nearly half of trans people in the United States had considered moving to a different state because of anti-trans legislation.
“It is so important that when we say we’re going to do something, we do it,” she said. “And that, to me, feels like the danger in all of this. Because it feels like, even still, frankly, Kansas City politicians and city officials are still using trans folks for their own political pawns and points. And we’re not people’s puppets.”
