School board candidate says opponent misquoted him on LGBTQ+ comments

One man asked candidates, “How many sexes are there?”

Candidate Frank Beer answered first. “Two,” he said. After the other candidates answered, Beer asked to clarify.

The Mercury wasn’t able to find anyone with a recording of the event. (We cover some but not all political forums for a given election.)

Candidate Courtney Hochman said in a Facebook post that Beer had said in the forum, “The LGBTQ population is a contagion.”

Hochman then asked, “Did you say ‘contagion’?”

Beer confirmed in an interview with The Mercury Tuesday he had said the word.

“But I said ‘social contagion,” he added.

Beer said he was misquoted and the longer answer included important context.

In a phone interview with The Mercury, Beer said he had been discussing statistics on teens.

“The pertinent part was, in some schools we are approaching 50% of kids who claim to be LGBTQI+,” he said. “This is just not reasonable. It’s become the cool kids’ club. That’s because it’s being glorified. It’s the result of social contagion.”

Beer said he thinks the distinction is important and called the misquote “disgusting.”

“We can agree to be disagreeable,” Beer said. “But to take something and turn it into something that, I’ll be honest, borders on slander… It’s too bad.”

He said he hasn’t seen a retraction or apology from Hochman.

“It is a topic that needs to be addressed, but this is an example of why people run away from it,” Beer said. “I feel bad that things have to be in attack mode all the time.”

Hochman said Tuesday that she doesn’t believe she misheard him, and in her mind, the context doesn’t change the sentiment behind Beer’s statement.

“He’s right, it was part of a longer statement,” she said. “But that’s a semantic argument. He’s still referring to a group of people as a social contagion or that their identity is caused by a social contagion.”

Hochman said she made the post because she felt like voters needed to know.

“I believe it qualifies as hate speech,” she said. “(It’s) his right to say those things. But there are consequences.”

As the Kansas Legislature rules on items related to transgender students in sports, Beer said he knows related issues may come before the school board.

He said he believes trans kids should play on the sports teams that correspond with the “gender they’re biologically born with.”

“It’s just a function of biology,” he said. “You can’t undo that physiology, particularly past puberty.”

He said allowing trans girls to compete on girls’ teams takes opportunities from biological girls.

“To be real fair, we’re looking out for the biological girls,” he said. “And we’re not excluding anyone. They can still play.”

Beer mentioned Lia Thomas, the trans woman who competed in swimming at the University of Pennsylvania, first on the men’s team and then on the women’s team.

“The worst thing is he’s got some fetishes that were served by him being in the locker rooms,” he said. “Pretty much freely admitting it.”

Some media outlets have quoted another swimmer as saying that Thomas had exposed male genitalia in the women’s locker room.