Missouri currently leads the nation for bills targeting the LGBTQ+ community, with many of those bills targeting transgender people — specifically, transgender kids.
Rabbi Daniel Bogard from Central Reform Congregation is one of the people fighting against those bills. Bogard has a transgender child and has been going down to Jefferson City for about five years to testify against bills targeting his child and others around the state.
“The first thing you learn when you have a trans kid in the state of Missouri is that you have to protect them from their government,” Bogard told KMOX. He said that when his kid first came out as trans, he and his family went to the state government right away — even before telling the kid’s grandparents.
“Before we told anyone else I told the general laws committee of the Missouri House of Representatives, because they are at war with our family, and they are at war with my child,” he said. “And we're just trying to live our lives. We're not trying to impose anything on anyone else. And yet they've decided that we are their political weapon that they are going to use.”
Many of the bills targeting the LGBTQ+ and transgender community have to do with drag performances, and some prevent schools from talking with students about gender and sexuality. Bogard said those bills misunderstand what it means to be trans.
“There's so much where people are trying to sexualize the existence of trans people, but that's not what it means to be trans. Right? It's just another way of being human,” he said. “I'm a rabbi, and that comes with a lot of education on Jewish history. And one of the remarkable things is, we have stories of trans Jews for thousands and thousands of years, really, because the truth of it is there have always been trans people, there will always be trans people.”
Bogard and other religious leaders in the state have testified against many of these bills in part because, they say, they’re an imposition on religious freedom.
“I absolutely believe that those who subscribe to that view of Christianity — and it's one particular view of Christianity — They absolutely should practice their faith,” he said. “They shouldn't force me to practice their faith and they shouldn't force our schools to enforce their faith.”
At the end of the day, Bogard said, he and other advocates just want to be able to live their lives and raise their children without threats that can sometimes keep them up at night.
Listen to Rabbi Daniel Bogard’s full conversation from Total Information AM:
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