A Trans Person Peed Here

A flyer for “A Trans Person Peed Here,” a benefit event held 8/24/26 in Lawrence, Kansas.

For them, it’s about preventing catastrophe. They exercise every lever of power, spend billions, utilize the world’s largest propaganda machines to bend the law to their will so they can prevent disaster. Disaster that has never once come close to occurring and has zero basis in reality, but still. World-altering stakes.

For us, by contrast, the stakes are very small: tiny, universal, utterly harmless trivialities of life. A single letter on bureaucratic forms, which doctors we’re allowed to see, where we’re permitted to use the bathroom. Minor, everyday issues that mean nothing to anyone besides us. Yet our lives are thrown into chaos for the sake of their anxieties, their comfort, their crises that have never come to pass.

Last month, a friend of mine named Siobhán Kirschstein received an official reprimand from her employer, the University of Kansas. Pursuant to SB 244, a law passed by the Kansas legislature earlier this year—rushed through backdoor maneuvering without public comment or accountability, as I described at the time—Siobhán was officially reprimanded for using the women’s restroom during her duty day as a custodian. While she is permitted to enter this restroom as part of her work duties, as a transgender woman she is forbidden from using that room for her own biological needs. The reprimand was prompted by a complaint submitted weeks earlier by an anonymous accuser. Siobhán was offered sympathy, hyperlinks to mental health resources, and a stern warning to not let it happen again.

The identity of this accuser, and the manner in which they were aggrieved by the knowledge that a trans woman used the bathroom, have been withheld; those details are to be protected at all turns, even as Siobhán is ordered to turn her life upside-down for nobody’s benefit. Whoever they are, presumably they acted to exercise the same goal served by all of the transphobic legislation of the last several years: they were trying to remove Siobhán from society. They were attempting to block her from our shared existence by cutting her off from her job, her community, and public facilities.

But Siobhán didn’t play along. She didn’t erase herself; she got louder. She told our local newspaper, told the ACLU, told national news outlets. (I’m not linking to the New York Times, as their contributions to the eradication of trans people is extremely well documented, one generally sympathetic article about Siobhán notwithstanding. Boycott their asses, I implore you.) And she got people involved.

On August 24th, 2026, a benefit was held by a coalition of community organizations including members of Trans Lawrence Coalition, an activist group I volunteered with during the previous transphobic legislative wave that gave us SB 180. This benefit was held on the first day of classes at KU to raise money for Siobhán’s legal defense and raise awareness of the human rights abuses that our legislature has opened the door to.

I was invited to participate in “A Trans Person Peed Here,” both as a performer with my group The Twangles and as a writer. I could have gone on about this issue for a very long time (clearly), but I restrained myself to these remarks:

A photo of Sylvie Althoff on a stage, banjo across her shoulders, delivering the following remarks to a crowd. Photo by Peaty Romano.

You know, it’s funny—I don’t know what I was expecting from this event, but I don’t see any transgender people here tonight. I’ve read a lot of news coverage about trans people, and I’ve read all the legislation put into place to stop them, and they sound scary.

The fictional trans people described by our elected leaders are a menace. These fictional trans people are predators, looking to commit sex crimes in bathrooms and use their marginalized status to get away with it; they’re bullies, looking to steal opportunities in sports or employment. These fictional trans people lurk around every corner, infiltrating society to erase cis people from existence—they might be in your schools, on your TV, or standing right behind you when you least expect it!

But again, I don’t see any of those trans people when I look around this room. Do you want to know who I see, here at this event?

I see neighbors—people who show up to help. People who babysit, who give rides to the airport, who deliver meals when someone’s sick or donate cash when someone can’t pay a bill.

I see artists—people who share their divine spark of creation by making beautiful things that didn’t exist before.

I see teachers and performers and servers and factory workers and custodians.

I see Kansans—people who work here, shop here, struggle and celebrate and grow old here. People who every day, by the sweat of their brows, build this community in Lawrence and everywhere across our state.

These are the people who are being hurt by SB244 and all the other hundreds of laws passed across the nation and the world in the last few years. The people making these laws are hurting their neighbors, and they’re not doing a thing to stop the fictional trans people they keep talking about. No matter what they say about protecting girls from violence or standing for science, they’re never going to stop those scary, invading trans people…because they don’t exist. We do, and we’re being hurt.

They’re devoting ridiculous amounts of time and money and energy to making cis people scared of us, to making our lives worse. But you know what? It doesn’t matter how hard they fight. We’re going to win, for three reasons.

First: laws like SB 244 are about bigoted, nonsensical fictions. They’re telling everyone that that trans menace, predators and bullies, is who we are. But one thing that unites every single trans person is that we know what it’s like to be told we’re something we’re not. Every one of us struggled and suffered under those incorrect perceptions, the stories people tell about us, and every one of us stood up and said no, that’s not true, that’s not who I am. That standing up is what makes us what we are, and it makes us powerful. Nobody is going to tell us that we’re something we’re not. Never again.

The second reason we’re going to win is that we’re not doing this alone. For every Ty Masterson or Kris Kobach looking to advance their own career by telling tales about the trans menace, we have hundreds of people who know better. Every friend, every neighbor, every fellow Kansan we know understands that we’re not a danger to them, and we deserve better than we’re getting.

Third: the movement fueling the persecution of our community is fascism, blatant and unrepentant. And the thing about fascism is that it always, always loses. Hate can do some terrible things, but hate doesn’t build anything. Someday—maybe far in the future, maybe sooner than we think—the people who’ve devoted their lives to hurting us are going to die. They’re going to be miserable and afraid and alone and dead. Look around: we’re not alone, and we never will be. We’ve built this community, and that’s something that lasts.

If you’re trans, your job is stay alive. Generations of queer and trans people have gone before us, and we owe it to them to persist, to grow into the elders that the next generations will look to and remember.

If you’re cis, your job is to fight for us. You already know they’re not stopping at Siobhán, they’re not stopping at the people in this room. They’re coming for more and more of your neighbors unless you stand up and make them stop.

Stay alive. Fight back. And don’t listen to their scary stories about how powerful they are or how inevitable their victory; they’re just as bogus as their stories about the made-up trans menace. We outnumber them, and unlike them, we know what it’s like to show up for love. They don’t stand a fucking chance against us.