Kansas City honors trans homecoming queens with historic resolution

17-year-old trans student Tristan Young faced an onslaught of right-wing hate after her peers at Kansas’s Oak Park High School voted to crown her homecoming queen. When Landon Patterson won eight years ago, she was the first trans girl to take home the crown.

In a show of support for the two young women, the Kansas City Council issued a proclamation late last month honoring the two and dedicating LGBTQ+ History Month to them for their game-changing achievements at Oak Park High School.

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Martha Hickson has continued to speak out against censorship and draw attention to local school board elections.

“I like to stay strong. I don’t really buckle unless something is really wrong,” Young said after bigots tried to mar her big night. “Right now, what’s happening is people are trying to turn a joyous thing into something that I should regret. But it’s going to stay a joyous thing.”

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“Being nominated and then becoming queen is so much deeper than just surface level,” she posted on Instagram after being crowned. “I have had a very difficult high school journey, but having the support of my friends, family and Oak Park has helped tremendously. I truly don’t know where I would be without it.” 

“It just felt good, that reassuring feeling, everything that I went through in 2015, it wasn’t for nothing,” Patterson told local news in September. “It makes me happy to see, even though there’s a lot of hate still, [Young’s] family is there for her, her students are there for her, and love always beats out the hate.”

“Landon made history as the first trans woman to be voted homecoming queen at Oak Park High School in 2015, and felt no one came to her aid then. This was a chance for us to do it right and recognize a 17-year-old and 25-year-old trans trailblazer here in our community,” Justice Horn, Chair of the Kansas City LGBTQ Commission, said in a statement to GLAAD. Horn spearheaded the initiative to honor the two women.

While rightwingers tried to stir outrage online over Young’s victory, they failed miserably.

“Trans women have a biological advantage in being popular with their high school classmates now,” Media Matters’ Ari Drennen posted on X following Young’s victory.

In 2013, 16-year-old Cassidy Lynn Campbell was crowned Marina High School’s homecoming queen in Huntington Beach, California. A few weeks later, Ray Ramsey, a transgender student at Concord High School in New Hampshire, was crowned homecoming king. Last year, a transgender girl, Scarlett Lenh, was crowned homecoming princess at a Colorado Springs high school.

“I think what is culturally significant is that it’s in Missouri rather than in New York City or San Francisco or someplace like that,” David Alonzo, then-chairman of the Kansas City chapter of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, said after Patterson’s win in 2015. “The fact that it is being positively received in the news, it could be considered a cultural thing.”

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