Where I Stand on Gender, Biological Sex, and Protecting Children

My son Elijah is nine. Like every parent in District 32, I think about what he sees, what he reads, and who is looking out for him when I am not in the room. A phone in a backpack can reach anything on the internet. A shelf in the children's section holds whatever someone decided to put there. A girls' locker room is only private if the law says it is.

None of that is a cable-news abstraction. It is the everyday business of raising a kid in Rapid City. It is also the lens for every position in this piece.

What I believe, in plain words

Men and women exist. Biology is real.

That is the principle. A state that cannot say what a man or a woman is cannot write a coherent law about sports, locker rooms, or shelters. So I will say it plainly, and if District 32 sends me to Pierre, I will fight to put it in law. Here is the full position:

1. Define sex in state law by biological reality. When a South Dakota statute says woman or man, those words need a fixed biological meaning. A law built on words that can mean anything protects no one.
2. Protect women's sports, locker rooms, and shelters. Those spaces exist because men and women are different. A girl who trains for years deserves a fair field. A woman walking into a shelter on the worst night of her life deserves a safe one.
3. Age verification on harmful websites. We card kids for cigarettes and keep them out of casinos. The internet should not be the one door a nine-year-old can walk through with nobody asking a thing.
4. Hold libraries accountable for harmful materials in children's sections. This is not about banning books for adults. It is about who answers for what sits on a shelf at a child's eye level.
5. No gender transition procedures for minors. Children cannot consent to permanent medical decisions. Adults can make their own choices. Kids are off limits.

Five lines. No fine print. Now the pushback, because these positions draw objections, and the objections deserve straight answers instead of talking points.

"Isn't this government overreach?"

I hear this from people I respect, including fellow conservatives, and small government is my instinct too. But defining sex in state law is not the government inserting itself into your life. It is the government being able to read its own statutes. Every law that mentions sex already requires a definition. The only question is whether your legislators write it plainly or leave it for someone else to decide later.

And look at what is not on my list. Nothing here reaches into an adult's private life. Every line sits around children and around spaces built for women. Protecting kids is the state's oldest job, not an expansion of it. That is not big government. That is a fence around the people the law exists to protect.

"You campaign on parental rights. Doesn't this override parents and doctors?"

This is the sharpest objection I get, and it deserves the most honest answer I can give.

A family court case brought my son to Rapid City in 2018. I have spent the years since fighting for parents, in my own case and at the Capitol in Pierre. Nobody needs to lecture me about parental rights. And on almost everything medical, I agree: parents decide, and the state should stay out of the exam room.

But parental rights have never meant that a parent can consent to anything on a child's behalf. We already draw hard age lines around permanent decisions, and we draw them for one reason: childhood is supposed to protect a child's future choices, not spend them. A gender transition procedure performed on a minor is permanent. That child has to live inside the decision for the next seventy years.

So my position is one word: wait. At eighteen, the decision belongs to them, fully and freely. Protecting a child's open future is not anti-parent. It is what parenting is.

"You're targeting vulnerable kids."

Kids wrestling with these questions are real, and they deserve compassion. Nothing in my platform calls for cruelty toward any child, and I will not stand for cruelty toward any child.

But compassion is not the same as irreversible medical intervention on a minor. A child who cannot vote, cannot sign a contract, and cannot buy a lottery ticket should not be making permanent medical decisions about their own body. Protecting a child from a permanent choice made at twelve is not an attack on that child. It is the same protection we extend to every kid on every other permanent choice. Kindness and honesty are not opposites. Every good dad has to be both, every single day.

"Age verification and library accountability is just censorship."

No one is banning books for adults. Adults can read what they want, and I will defend that. Read what I am actually proposing.

Age verification on harmful websites applies the same standard we already use everywhere else in a child's life. We do not let a fourth grader into an R-rated movie alone, and nobody calls the ticket counter censorship. On libraries, the question is narrower and more honest: what belongs in the children's section, and who answers for it when material that is harmful to minors ends up there? Every other institution trusted with kids answers for what it puts in front of them. Schools do. Daycares do. Libraries should too.

"Aren't there bigger issues than this?"

Housing. Property taxes. A family court system that grinds families down. Yes, District 32 has real problems, and my platform takes on every one of them.

But I am not willing to treat protecting children as a distraction from the real work. It is the real work. And here is the practical truth: writing clear definitions into statute costs the state almost nothing and takes nothing away from any other fight. A legislator votes on hundreds of bills every session. You deserve to know where I stand on all of them before you hand me the seat, not after.

The ask

District 32 covers downtown Rapid City and North Rapid. Two seats, both on the ballot November 3, 2026. If you want a representative who will say what a woman is, protect women's sports and shelters, keep harmful material away from your kids, and answer hard questions without flinching, I am asking for one of your two votes.

Read the full platform at zac4sd.com. That is where this starts.