Editors note: Amid a charged national conversation about transgender rights, the question of how best to love, support, and care for trans-identifying young Americans has become a source of fervent debate. In recent months, as a wave of legislation and orders has emerged from conservative statehouses designed to block gender- affirming medical treatment for young people, Vogue sent the photographer Ethan James Green and writer Devan Daz to Texas to meet a girl already very much in the public eye. The following text, images, and video documentary are the result. Every young persons story is different, and Vogue urges readers and parents to consult resources as varied as the Human Rights Campaign, the American Medical Association, PFLAG, Gender Spectrum, the Trevor Project, and others when seeking support and care. In a quiet neighborhood in Austin, Texas, an 11-year-old girl walks to the end of a road to check her familys mailbox. Afterward, she will pause to pet a friendly cat, greet the neighbors, or maybe visit a local lemonade stand. She likes to take her time, because a busy schedule waits at home. Most days consist of school lessons taught by her mom, Zoom meetings with agents, auditions, Discord group chats, video games, and a book proposal shes working on with a potential publisher. YouTube rabbit holes (on Greek goddesses and Dolly Parton, mostly) slide in between responsibilities. Despite the full itinerary, her mother makes sure she splits duties of taking out the trash and feeding the chickens with her younger brother, Kaleb. One morning, eyes still drowsy from the night before, she tells me, I sleep with my mom, because Im afraid of what could happen. Im really tired.
She isnt talking about a simple childhood fear of the dark. Kai Shappley, and all transgender children in Texas, now have more to fear than the boogeyman. In February 2022, Texas governor Greg Abbott issued a letter to the Department of Family and Protective Services directing the state agency to investigate medical treatments for transgender adolescents such as puberty blockers and hormonesas child abuse. The letter asserts that there are reporting requirements for all licensed professionals who have direct contact with children who may be subject to such abuse, including doctors, nurses, and teachers, and that a failure to report merits criminal penalties.
Kai began her social transition in pre-K, at age four, but with puberty on the horizon, the question of medical transition has now become more pressing. Kimberly Shappley, Kai and Kalebs mother, is an ordained minister, formerly a member of a conservative community in Pearland, Texas, outside Houston. She once believed she had been called on by God, and her governor, to condemn children like her daughter. Shes a different person now. It was watching Kai become one of the first trans children in the nation to endure the glare of public attention that changed her forever. As Kimberly remembers, the year was 2016, and five-year-old Kai, looking like any other cisgender girl her age, endured incidents where she wet herself even as school leaders at the district level debated which bathrooms were appropriate for kids like her to use. Kais humiliations became national news, and her wide-set blue eyes and yellow-blond hair made her difficult to dismissas conservative critics sometimes crudely doas a boy trying to invade girls bathrooms. On the broiling day I visit the Shappleys, the first 100-degree Texas day of the year, Kimberly tells me about the media onslaught while we take refuge in her air-conditioned living room, sipping sweet tea. When the first article about our family came out, she says, death threats flooded the comments, and someone posted our address for everyone to see. The online vitriol threatened to turn physical. Being seen in public became treacherous as Kais story spread. Kimberly couldnt go to the local Pearland grocery store without being recognized. The people who owned the apartment we were renting moved us to a bigger place and didnt make us pay more, she saysa memorable kindness. And the owners put all the utilities in their name so we couldnt be traced. All of this followed Kimberlys separation (and eventual divorce) from Kai and Kalebs father, and a relocation that had cost her dearly. Before the apartment in Pearland, the Shappleys lived in a shelter while Kimberly pursued a health-science degree at a community college, with the goal of becoming a nurse. She had a ninth-grade education. They had me take placement tests, assuming Id need remedial classes, she says. Kimberly graduated in 18 months, made the deans list, and delivered the commencement address for her class. To Kai and her mother, Kimberly, visibility is a kind of strategy: Fame and success feel like a lifeline, a path to a different, less vulnerable life After that came nursing school, paid for by grants that kept her family afloat but required she keep up her grades. If I didnt, I wouldnt be able to make rent. So we did it. We lived on, like, $208 a month, and the kids knew that if we ran out of toilet paper, you needed to go to the gas station. It wasnt until Kimberly began nursing school that she started to question what religion had taught her. She asked her instructors probing questions on gender and sexuality. Does a child understand enough about gender to assert their own identity? She learned many children can do this by age three, even if their gender conflicts with their assignment at birth. One night while tucking Kai into bed, she noticed her legs were blue from loss of circulation. In a secret act of desperation, Kai had been putting on too-small doll clothes to lay claim to a forbidden girlhood. Kimberly had been fighting her childs femininity, believing it was God who called on her to shave Kais head and force her into boys clothes. But Kai wouldnt surrender. Kai didnt just tell me she was a girl, Kimberly remembers. Shed say, Mom, you know Im a girl. Kimberly began to notice depressive tendencies in her toddler. I had to make the decision to love my child more than I loved the church.
Church had been the place to socialize, worship, and seek guidance. Pastors, Kimberly says, instruct their congregations how to think, how to vote, and what movies to watch. Shed grown up in this community between Mississippi and Texas. She was ordained as a charismatic minister, which eventually led her to ministry work at a Houston megachurch. That ended when Kimberly decided to support Kais gender expression. Kimberly and her kids became isolatedfrom church, from extended family, from friends shed had for years. At the time, Kimberly remembers asking God to send her to hell if she was making the wrong choice. Im the one letting Kai live this way, she says. If this is a sin, I need God to punish me and not my kid. Around the time of the bathroom incidents at school and the storm of media attention, Kimberly teamed up with Equality Texas, a statewide organization that advocates for LGBTQ+ Texans and parents of transgender children. During a press conference, Kimberly spoke to LGBTQ+ Texans directly, asking for forgiveness: Im sorry for every time I plucked a Bible verse out of context and I hurt you with it, she said. I was a hateful reflection of a loving God.
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I'm Queen of Tomorrow baby! Remember: heat from fire, fire from heat! She/her