But the new governor [Laura Kelly] will face a Republican-controlled legislature, with staunch conservatives who have vowed — in a resolution written by Brownback’s son-in-law Eric Teetsel — to “oppose all efforts to validate a transgender identity” and added language in the party platform that states “God created two genders, male and female.”

“This is the major question of our time, and if we don’t understand the nature of human sexual identity then we’re truly lost as a society,” said Teetsel, the outgoing president of the conservative Family Policy Alliance of Kansas. “Allowing lies about the nature of human sexuality to spread is not loving our neighbor.”