I found Sandy Kim’s letter to The Times (“Not Welcoming,” July 21) troubling. In her letter, Kim accused two town council members and me of speaking “hateful rhetoric” against her transgendered son, a biological female who identifies as a male.

The letter is troubling because I have never disparaged transgendered people as a group nor have I ever accused them of criminality or any other misdeeds. Hateful rhetoric is an ill-defined term and people often use it to describe non-hateful speech that they simply disagree with. I suspect that is the case here.

So, I call on Sandy Kim to tell the readers what, exactly, I ever said or wrote that is hateful rhetoric. Any such statements, I assume, would be associated with two bills that I sponsored this year.

The first bill required that all school bathrooms, locker rooms, showers and hotel rooms on school trips be restricted to persons of the same gender at birth, except for single-user ones. However, I required schools to provide single-user facilities to transgender students who did not want to go into a facility that aligned with their biological sex. My bill accommodated all students and spared biological, 14-year-old female high school students the terror of standing naked in a gym shower next to 18-year-old biological males who identified as female.

My second bill required schools to receive parental permission before calling a transgender student by a pronoun or name that did not align with the student’s biological gender. It was about not keeping parents in the dark about psychological problems their kids have that drive some children to suicide. It was about not allowing schools to engage in the gender transitioning of children without parental permission or knowledge.

Respecting both sides of an issue and promoting parental rights is not hateful rhetoric.