NOT BACKING DOWN: “Kai didn’t just tell me she was a girl,” says Kimberly Shappley, mother to Kai, 11, pictured. “She’d say, ‘Mom, you know I’m a girl.’ ” Photographed by Ethan James Green, Vogue, August 2022.
This article was first published in 2022.
Vogue Editor’s 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 Díaz 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 person’s 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 family’s 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 she’s 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 I’m afraid of what could happen. I’m really tired.”
She isn’t 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 hormones—as 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.
FAMILY TIES: Kimberly Shappley (center) with her son Kaleb, nine, and daughter Kai.
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 Kaleb’s 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. She’s 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. Kai’s humiliations became national news, and her wide-set blue eyes and yellow-blond hair made her difficult to dismiss—as conservative critics sometimes crudely do—as 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 Kai’s story spread. Kimberly couldn’t 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 didn’t make us pay more,” she says—a memorable kindness. “And the owners put all the utilities in their name so we couldn’t be traced.” All of this followed Kimberly’s separation (and eventual divorce) from Kai and Kaleb’s 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 I’d need remedial classes,” she says. Kimberly graduated in 18 months, made the dean’s 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 didn’t, I wouldn’t 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 wasn’t 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 child’s femininity, believing it was God who called on her to shave Kai’s head and force her into boys clothes. But Kai wouldn’t surrender. “Kai didn’t just tell me she was a girl,” Kimberly remembers. “She’d say, ‘Mom, you know I’m 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.” She’d 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 Kai’s gender expression. Kimberly and her kids became isolated—from church, from extended family, from friends she’d had for years.
At the time, Kimberly remembers asking God to send her to hell if she was making the wrong choice. “I’m 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: “I’m 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.”
LESSONS LEARNED: Kai with teachers at Menchaca Elementary, where she graduated this year. From left: Dylan Brown, Mary Ellen Gillam, Erin Gerton, and principal Eliza Loyola.
In the summer of 2017, she was asked to be the keynote speaker for the Houston Pride Festival. Kimberly was surprised. “I had been preaching against LGBTQ+ people from pulpits a month earlier,” she tells me. She recalls being harassed by Christian protesters as she made her way to the venue. “Even when I was homophobic,” she says, “I would’ve never taken the scripture written on their signs so violently out of context.” What stays with her from that first Pride is the loving welcome of queer adults asking her to bless their older parents and expressing their dreams of having a mother as accepting as Kimberly. Suddenly she was back in church, laying hands over people in prayer, asking God to reunite their families. Kimberly smiles remembering this. “I prayed for more people at Pride than I ever did at church.”
Free from the constraints of the church, but with no cooperation from Kai’s school, Kimberly moved her family to Austin in 2018. Kai and Kaleb enrolled in Menchaca Elementary, a school within the LGBTQ+-affirming Austin Independent School District. On a visit at the end of a school day, I meet with principal Eliza Loyola in her office to talk about Kai’s first year as a first grader. “When I met Kimberly, I was like, ‘Your daughter needs a bathroom? Okay.’ It was a very matter-of-fact conversation,” Loyola says. Walking through the halls of Menchaca, I see signs that read trans rights in children’s scribbles, and a wall dedicated to Black excellence. Principal Loyola credits her district for all of this, and its explicit support of LGBTQ+ students, including a yearly Pride celebration. “When attacks on Pride Week are going on, and your district responds with pictures of our Pride celebration, it shows that we’re not backing down. We’re not going to hide what we’re doing, and in fact we’re going to advertise it and share pictures.”
Not much has been made at Menchaca of the attention Kai has gotten in recent years—she’s been the subject of an Emmy-winning them. documentary, and been covered by Vice News and Time. She has also made a foray into acting, appearing on an episode of Netflix’s The Baby-Sitters Club (her character arc closely resembles her own experience: a trans girl who is misgendered by adults around her). To Kai and Kimberly, this visibility is a kind of strategy: Fame and success feel like a lifeline, a path to a different, less vulnerable life. “Kai is going to have to make really good money in her life,” Kimberly says. “The places that are safest for queer people to live are the most expensive cities in America.” Still, it wasn’t until last year, in the fourth grade, after testifying at the state Capitol asking Texas lawmakers to, in her words, “make good choices,” that Kai came out to her class. Much of Kai’s fourth-grade instruction had been over Zoom, and her then teacher, Mary Ellen Gillam, says Kai had studiously kept her camera off. Gillam remembers the day this changed, when Kai switched her camera on and spoke to her classmates about her advocacy work. Gillam guided Kai through the process of coming out. “I took her aside to let her know she didn’t have to answer any questions unless she wanted to. But she did answer questions, and the students asked if they could come support her at the next speech. I’d never seen her be this vulnerable with her peers.” That spring, Kai and her brother returned to in-person school at Menchaca. With threats proliferating online, Kimberly felt the school’s security and front office staff acted as a buffer between Kai and the people who wished to harm her.
At the time of writing, 26 states have put forward anti-trans bills. Ohio hopes to enact the Save Adolescents From Experimentation (SAFE) Act, modeled after similar legislation passed last year in Arkansas, which would ban access to gender-affirming care for transgender minors. Meanwhile, Governor Abbot’s directive has been argued over in Texas courts. In March, a state’s appeals court, prompted by a lawsuit brought by the ACLU and Lambda Legal, upheld an injunction blocking investigations into parents. In May, Texas’s state Supreme Court partially overturned that injunction. By June, a Texas judge had blocked investigations again, with more hearings on Abbot’s directive to come.
What happens if transgender children do get taken away from their families? Foster care and an uncertain future. (At least 104 children have died in Texas’s long-term care system since September 2019, six as a result of documented abuse by caregivers.) Principal Loyola works hard to shield her students from this reality, but it is an impossible task. “It’s hard to talk about what’s happening in the state without thinking about my campus on a day-to-day level,” Loyola says. Kai was halfway through fifth grade when Abbott’s directive came out, and Kimberly made the decision to pull both of her kids out of school and homeschool them—even as she still works as a nurse for a nonprofit dedicated to underserved communities in Texas. Kai’s fifth-grade teacher, Erin Gerton, felt she was put in an impossible position—ordered by the language of the directive to report trans kids and their families, but knowing she would refuse to do so. Gerton is moving to Portland, Oregon, because the experience of being a teacher in Texas has become too overwhelming. “I can’t teach in Texas anymore,” she says. “I can’t do it. It’s really sad, because the state is experiencing a teacher shortage. But everything going on gets in the way of educating children.”
JUST KIDS: Kai with Stefano Perez, Penelope Ojeda-Gomez, and Paul Saenz, three of her friends from Menchaca Elementary.
Despite no longer attending Menchaca, Kai walked with her graduating fifth-grade class. When Loyola and I talk about this, the principal’s eyes fill with tears. “You know she doesn’t go by Kai at school, right? Here we call her Esther. She is an 11-year-old girl who runs on the playground and studies for tests. Kai is the public figure.” The story of Queen Esther is Kai’s favorite in the Bible—a queen who saved the Jewish people from destruction. “To see Esther flourish and blossom with opportunities is amazing,” says Loyola. “I also know how hard it is for her mom, because they have fought so hard to have normal school experiences. She doesn’t get to have that anymore because she is so high profile in the work she does. I think she’s young enough where she doesn’t see it as a responsibility, but people put it on her as a responsibility. That’s hard.”
With middle school on the horizon, the safety net will shift, and many of Kai’s friends are zoned for different schools. Kai hopes the path she’s chosen will lead her out of Texas. She’s now represented by CAA, which could mean a future of cameras, more TV shows, and campaigns. Kai already has a star-in-training persona that can be hard to penetrate. She projects confidence—even while anxiously picking at the skin on her hands. Kimberly worries for her daughter, but sees no other way. Success is a plan that has to work.
At the foot of Kai’s bed sit two black-and-white portraits of Dolly Parton, sent to her by the singer herself. Dolly is her lodestar, a cheeky southern blond with a natural instinct for doing good in the world. Kai cites Dolly’s literacy program for children as she tells me a story of her own advocacy—describing the time she led a conversation between staff and her classmates about misgendering. She’s a natural speaker and storyteller, someone who has grown up pleading with adults to treat her with respect, telling her story, sharing it, posting it. Hence the book proposal she’s working on—a Christian children’s series about queerness. Why Christian? “Because Christian families need help.” Even at age 11, Kai is aware that freedom cannot be achieved alone.