photo by: Journal-World File

Janis Guyot is president of Lawrence's PFLAG group, whose mission is to support, educate and advocate for the LGBTQ community.

Janis Guyot had to turn off a legislative hearing she had been listening to Wednesday because, as with many recent hearings targeting transgender people, “the hatefulness and ignorance” were too much to bear.

“It made me sick to my stomach,” she said of the hearing that ultimately led to a ban on transgender girls participating in sports in Kansas.

But that moment of revulsion and others like it will not prevent Guyot, the mother of a transgender daughter, from doing all she can to fight for the LGBTQ community.

Guyot is the president of Lawrence PFLAG, a recently formed group whose mission is to support, educate and advocate for the LGBTQ community, who have become the target of what Guyot calls a “constant barrage of hateful legislation” denying them the use of gender-affirming care, the use of public restrooms and participation in sports, among other things.

In Kansas on Wednesday, the Republican-controlled Legislature overrode a veto by Gov. Laura Kelly and instituted a ban on transgender athletes from girls and women’s sports — a move that Guyot described as “asinine” not only for its hurtfulness but also because so much energy and expense have gone toward an issue that affects so few Kansans. As many have noted, the number of transgender girls participating in sports in the state is minuscule.

“It’s hard to determine exactly, but in the stuff I’ve read, they think there’s (maybe) like 11 transgender girls” in that athletic community.

“They don’t care what the professionals say,” Guyot said of the lawmakers, and they don’t care what their constituents think. They have the numbers to do it, she said, so they are going to do it, regardless of the consequences.

But it’s important to not lose hope, she said, even when “every day it seems a new law is made” to punish an LGBTQ child or a new book is banned that would have comforted a child.

“I think, unfortunately, this pendulum is swinging right now and there’s not a lot we can do except (show) support,” she said.

Guyot has been heartened by the response to her new PFLAG group, which meets monthly (this month’s meeting is April 13 from 6 to 7 p.m. at the Lawrence Public Library), and she has seen increasing collaboration with groups like Rainbow Kids and Families and Lawrence Pride to form a larger “umbrella of advocacy.”

“I think a lot of people are understanding that the only way we can really kind of combat some of this hateful stuff is to stay strong and become stronger as a group,” she said.

At one of PFLAG’s first meetings, Guyot said participants ranged in age from 13 to 81, underlining the reality that LGBTQ issues affect every generation, and she sees more than a ray of hope in the fact that “to these younger generations, LGBTQ rights are extremely important.”

The Journal-World on Wednesday reached out to the Lawrence school district and to Rainbow Kids and Families for comment on the Kansas legislation, but has yet to hear back.