By Cat Poland
Better Off Said
It’s March. And March means potatoes. But I won’t be planting any potatoes this year.
Every St. Patrick’s Day, I plant potatoes in my garden in honor of my Irish immigrant ancestors. It’s a nod to their resilience and survival after escaping the potato famine that killed more than one million people (1845–1852). There was Mike Dugan, who came from County Wicklow, Ireland, who married Johanna Wall, from Clonmel, Ireland. They lived here and there across the U.S., then eventually helped establish Clonmel, Kan., in the 1870s.
Who knows how differently their lives would have been had they not had to leave Ireland. Their home had become unsafe, made untenable thanks to draconian government policies, They left behind everything they knew to find safer ground for their families.
And now, 170 years later, my family is in the same position. The Kansas legislature has created an unsafe living environment for families like mine, and we’ve got to go.
I won’t be planting any potatoes this year.
No Transgenders Need Apply
With the recent passing of SB244 (falsely sold as “protecting women and girls”), I realized that Kansas will starve us to death if we let it. This law mercilessly targets transgender Kansans by revoking their IDs and barring them from public bathrooms that are safest for them to use. We are not welcome here. No matter how long we’ve been tilling this soil. No matter how much we’ve grown the economy, our communities, or this state.
As it always does, history repeats itself. We need a scapegoat, an easy target to blame—another parallel with my ancestors. When the Irish people began appearing on the East Coast in droves, there was no warm welcome. They faced persecution, prejudice, and exploitation. Signs were hung outside businesses that said, “No Irish Need Apply.” They were called, “dirty and evil” and were depicted in cruel caricatures in propaganda materials of the time. Sound familiar?
The Irish didn’t deserve that kind of treatment, and neither do transgender Kansans. If we want to remove emotion and political bias from it, look at the statistics alone. Trans people are much more likely to be victims of a crime than to perpetrate a crime. And when it comes to sexual assault, victims are far, far more likely to be attacked by a male friend, family member or close acquaintance than by a “man pretending to be a woman” in the bathroom. (Look no further than two school district employees recently arrested in Salina and Peabody-Burns.)
And yet, as of this writing, “Erin’s Law” (a bill requiring schools to educate students on the signs of sexual grooming and assault) hasn’t passed the Kansas legislature. Passing it should be a no-brainer. Why then, has “Erin’s Law” stalled, while the legislature was able to hold an “emergency” hearing to quickly pass SB244?
It seems then that if Kansas lawmakers were genuinely interested in “protecting women and girls,” they could do so. But they’d rather target transgender Kansans instead.
I won’t be planting any potatoes this year.
Will the Real Kansans Please Stand Up?
At an (extremely rare) public appearance in Oakley last year, Sen. Roger Marshall denied the identity of constituents who showed up in opposition, saying that “real Kansans” supported Trump and his agenda. Rich words from a man who spends much of his time in Florida.
But the situation poses an important question … who are “real” Kansans? I would say it’s those who admire and adhere to the principle that shaped this state from the beginning…freedom. They called us “Bleeding Kansas” for a reason, willing to shed our blood to remain a state free of slavery.
John Brown died for this cause, as he said in court before he was sentenced to death: “Now if it is deemed necessary that I should […] mingle my blood further with the blood of my children, and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments—I submit; so let it be done.”
Where has this spirit of freedom gone? Where has the immigrant grit gone? Are we now so scared of people who are different from us, when they pose no actual harm?
I won’t pretend that John Brown or my Irish ancestors would have understood or supported trans rights. (Although trans people have always existed.) But if you follow the through line, and remember how radical their ideas and identities were at the time, it’s not a big stretch of the imagination.
Kansas, you’ve lost your pioneer courage, your convictions, and your scrappy “can-do” attitude. Instead, you’ve traded it for pearl-clutching policies that do nothing but harm the vulnerable and embolden bullies. You will reap what you sow. I won’t. I won’t be planting any potatoes this year.
Cat Poland is a local writer. More of her work can be found at substack.com/@catpoland.