Suzanne Wheeler and her wife don’t want to leave the Kansas City area, their eight adult children and their seven grandchildren. They don’t want to walk away from their friends, their community and their support system.
But they are making plans nonetheless.
The middle-aged transgender couple already bought property in Portugal, where transgender rights are more protected. And they are ready to go when necessary.
“I don’t want to leave my country,” said Wheeler, a retired U.S. Army colonel. “I spent my entire life supporting and defending the Constitution of the United States. But the situation that we have at hand — I may have to.”
Kansas City’s transgender community is sandwiched between two states where Republican-controlled legislatures have made limiting transgender health care and other rights a top priority. Now that President Donald Trump has returned to the White House, an onslaught is coming at the federal level, too, with executive orders that may portend curtailed transgender rights and access to care across the country.
Members of Kansas City’s transgender community said they worry most about growing limits on health care — even for transgender adults — and about new rules that could prevent them from having driver’s licenses and passports that accurately reflect their gender, putting their safety at risk.
“It’s a really tough environment to be trans or to be raising trans kids these days,” said Shira Berkowitz, senior director for public policy with PROMO, a Missouri LGBTQ rights organization.
The wave of legislation and other policies, they said, appear to be a calculated push for “the erasure of transgender people from society.”
Proposed laws and new laws
Fewer than 4% of Missouri adults identify as LGBTQ, according to the nonprofit Movement Advancement Project, and an even slimmer percentage identify as transgender. (It’s only 0.5% of people nationwide.) Yet 56 bills introduced in the Missouri General Assembly this year would legislate some aspect of transgender life.
That’s more than in every other state except Texas, where 66 bills aimed at the trans community were introduced, according to a tally kept by journalist Erin Reed, who follows transgender issues on her blog Erin in the Morning.
The Missouri bills are wide-ranging, including:
- Driver’s license restrictions that require using a person’s gender assigned at birth.
- Bathroom bans that dictate which bathrooms transgender people are allowed to use in the state.
- Constitutional amendments that outlaw gender-affirming care for minors along with abortion.
- And one bill, which defines “sex” only as “an individual’s reproductive biology at birth,” threatening protections against discrimination for transgender people.
The long list of legislation in the state also includes several bills focused primarily on extending Missouri’s ban on gender-affirming care for people younger than 18 and continuing a ban on transgender youth playing sports for teams that match their gender identity. Both of those laws passed in 2023 but have a 2027 expiration date.
Lawmakers who support restrictions to gender-affirming care — including puberty blockers, hormone replacement therapy and surgeries — argue that children could be irreparably harmed by treatments and later regret getting them. But there is widespread agreement in the medical community that gender blockers, the most common medical treatment given to children, simply pause puberty but don’t cause permanent change. Surgery is exceedingly rare among children younger than 18.
In Kansas, five bills targeting transgender issues were introduced this year. The big one, banning gender-affirming care for Kansans younger than 18, passed on Feb. 18, over Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto.
The Kansas bill bans recommended medical treatments and social transitioning, which critics say could prohibit teachers from using a student’s preferred pronouns in class.
If the Kansas ban stands up to a court challenge, it’s expected to take effect soon, although people already receiving care have until 2026 to stop care. The new law means Kansas City families with transgender children will likely look to states farther away where the care remains legal.
But those states are shrinking in number. Twenty-seven states have banned gender-affirming care for minors, so providers can have long waits. And access could become even more limited if the White House has its way.
In January, Trump issued an executive order meant to limit care for people younger than 19 by restricting federal funding. The order, which has been temporarily blocked in federal court, already prompted some providers in states where care is still legal to preemptively stop offering it.
Cait Smith, director of LGBTQI+ policy with the Center for American Progress, said often laws and rules are written to be so confusing or cumbersome that insurers or providers just give in.
“They feel hard to implement,” Smith said.
That’s what happened with Missouri’s 2023 law, which included a grandfather clause to allow minors already receiving care to continue. But instead of trying to figure out which patients were eligible and which weren’t, gender care providers moved across state lines or stopped the care altogether.
That is one way lawmakers and politicians may try to put a halt to adult care, Smith said.
Restricting funding and creating burdensome requirements that are expensive and difficult to implement is another possibility. That could include requiring clinics to have hallways a certain width or forcing patients to go to a clinic every time they need a hormone treatment instead of just taking it at home.
“It could be very similar to attempts to curtail access to abortion care,” Smith said.
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey issued a sweeping rule in 2023 that would have banned all gender-affirming care — for adults and children. After a judge blocked the order and the Missouri legislature passed the ban on minor care, Bailey withdrew the order.
Life-saving care isn’t an option
Gender dysphoria is the medical diagnosis used to describe the psychological distress someone who is transgender may experience. Major medical organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, agree that care is medically necessary and saves lives.
A 2023 study by the Williams Institute found that 42% of transgender adults in the U.S. had attempted suicide, while 81% of trans adults had thought about it. And the Trevor Project, a national organization that provides mental health services for LGBTQ youth, found a 72% increase in suicide attempts among trans and nonbinary youth between 2018 and 2022, a period when 19 states, including Missouri and Kansas, implemented anti-transgender laws.
Calls and texts to the Trevor Project’s crisis line jumped 700% the day after the November general election and have seen “significant increases” since Inauguration Day.
Hazel Krebs, a transgender author and speaker who lives in the Kansas City area, battled substance abuse and struggled with mental health issues before transitioning to female when she was 39. In 2018, she tried to kill herself.
Having the ability to transition, Krebs said, saved her life. Now, at 43, she’s happy.
“It’s because I’m trans,” she said. “It’s all because I found out who I am. It’s all because I get to be me.”
Giving up gender-affirming care as some politicians might direct would never be an option, she said.
Karen, a Kansas City mother, said her transgender daughter wouldn’t be here without care. Karen, who asked that only her first name be used to protect her family’s privacy, discovered her daughter, who is now an adult, trying to kill herself when she was an adolescent. Before she transitioned, she was never happy.
“She would barely talk,” Karen said. “She would barely engage with anyone or anything.”
Years later, Karen understands clearly that helping her daughter transition was the only option. But that doesn’t mean it was easy when her daughter told her as a young teenager that she was transgender.
“It took us many years to wrap our heads around what transgender is,” she said. “It’s not an easy thing. It’s complicated. … When this first happened to us, I’m praying, ‘Lord, what kind of joke is this? What are you doing to me? What am I supposed to do?’”
But recently, after her daughter, now 25, went through gender-affirming surgery, Karen saw her take a selfie for the first time.
“That’s when we knew,” she said.
Words do damage: mental health worries
The many bills and threats to gender-affirming care are damaging to transgender people who have fought to become who they are, said James Moran, director of education and public relations with Our Spot KC, a nonprofit that provides housing and other services to people in the LGBTQ community.
The potential damage doesn’t stop with the laws and executive orders that go into effect, Moran said. The constant din of debate about transgender people’s right to exist does real damage, too. And it amplifies fear and misunderstanding, Moran said.
“That makes it easier to demonize and dehumanize,” Moran said.
Krebs said she used to feel pretty safe walking around Kansas City, where in 2023 the City Council adopted a resolution designating the city as a safe haven for gender-affirming care. But that has changed since the election.
“My geographic circle has shrunk quite a bit,” she said.
At the same time, she sees more people who aren’t transgender showing support and realizing how much of a backlash she and other transgender people are facing. She believes many people are noticing that the constant derision toward transgender people is meant to create a distraction.
“I have confidence that the populace is smart enough to see that and they’ll say, ‘Stop talking about trans people and start solving the problems,’” Krebs said.
Krebs said she almost left Kansas when the state changed ID requirements, forcing her to have an “M” for male on her drivers license. But then she realized that many transgender people couldn’t afford the option of leaving.
“That was a wake-up call that I just need to be here,” she said. “My personality is such that I’m in front of people. I’m willing to talk to reporters. There’s not enough of that.”
Karen said she and her family are making plans to leave. She has come to believe that trying to make change in Missouri is too difficult. In a blue state, she hopes, she can be a guide for people who need to escape a place where laws have become too restrictive.
“If (Democratic presidential candidate Kamala) Harris had won, we probably would have stayed for a little bit longer,” she said. “But I’ve felt for a long time it’s very difficult to fight in Missouri.”
Wheeler said she will finally leave Kansas when she can’t get health care or when the government forces her to change her gender on her government IDs.
“Those are my personal triggers,” she said.
She’s still hoping they won’t happen.
Outside her suburban Kansas home, an American flag waves from atop a 20-foot flagpole. Wheeler loves the country she spent her career protecting. But it’s becoming a place where she no longer feels safe.
“I’m nearing 60,” she said. “I don’t want to leave my country. I don’t want to leave my home …. People have lost their minds about ‘gender ideology.’ It’s not an ideology. We’re not an ideology. We’re people. Nobody asked for this.”
This story was originally published by The Beacon, a fellow member of the KC Media Collective.
