Kansas lawmaker bemoans sharing Capitol restroom with a ‘huge transgender female’
A Kansas lawmaker complained about sharing Kansas Statehouse bathrooms with a “huge transgender female,” as part of an email about a bill banning transgender athletes from girls sports.
Rep. Cheryl Helmer, a Republican from Mulvane, outside Wichita, repeated the false claim that women and children are “raped, sodomized and beaten” in bathrooms by “transgenders who may or may not be real.”
“Personally I do not appreciate the huge transgender female who is now in our restrooms in the Capitol. It is quite uncomforting. I have asked the men if they would like a woman in their restroom and they freaked out,” Helmer said in an email to a transgender graduate student at the University of Kansas who had written to chastise her yes vote on the sports bill.
Helmer declined to speak with The Star, but she told the Topeka Capital-Journal she was referring to Rep. Stephanie Byers, a Wichita Democrat and Kansas’ first transgender lawmaker.
LGBTQ advocates and Byers denounced Helmer’s statement as bigoted. House Speaker Ron Ryckman, an Olathe Republican, said the email was “unfortunate.”
Byers told The Star it was the first time since joining the Legislature she’d been attacked by a colleague in such a pointed way.
“I’m not shocked by it. I know who I am and I know what the ideology is that’s opposed to people like me,” Byers said. “Just my being here puts a stop to some of this erasure that they’re trying to push for.”
She said Helmer’s statement represented an effort to create fear of transgender people where there shouldn’t be.
“We see this twisting of facts to create an ideology that paints people into a position where we’re people to be feared. Referring to me as large? I’m 5 foot, 8-inches. Is that large?” Byers said.
Helmer’s email came days before lawmakers are expected to attempt to override Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto of a bill banning transgender athletes from girls sports in Kansas schools.
Helmer echoed proponents’ statements that transgender girls have an unfair advantage over cisgender girls — those whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth. “It is 1000% unfair that a man can ‘feel’ like a woman and change his sex to woman and compete against women,” she said.
Brenan Riffel, a KU graduate student from Shawnee, had emailed Helmer and other lawmakers to ask them to support transgender Kansans.
Riffel called Helmer’s response “disgusting.”
“Politicians who support this stuff say we’re the victims because we don’t agree with how you identify,” Riffel told The Star. “Identity is not something that’s up for debate.”
The bill passed the Kansas House and Senate in early April but lacked a veto-proof majority. Tom Witt, the executive director of Equality Kansas, pointed to speeches supporting the bill on the House floor — including Wichita Rep. Susan Humphries comparing a ban on transgender children in sports to a daily security sweep in the chamber — as evidence of bigotry.
“They’re saying the quiet part out loud now,” Witt said. “They’re just exposing their real motive, which is hatred and bigotry.”
House Minority Leader Tom Sawyer said Helmer’s statement was proof that the “Fairness in Women’s Sports Act” is about “a deep hate of ‘others’” rather than protecting women.
“If Rep. Helmer is so brazenly bigoted in documented, recorded correspondence with the general public, it isn’t hard to imagine what she says behind closed doors,” Sawyer said in a statement.
The Star’s Jonathan Shorman contributed to this report.
This story was originally published April 25, 2022 at 4:55 PM with the headline "Kansas lawmaker bemoans sharing Capitol restroom with a ‘huge transgender female’."
