Kimberly Shappley is as conservative and Christian as they come.

It was her child who, at just three years of age, would challenge her faith and rock her to the core.
For Shappley and her family, it all began with a hair bow.

“I want a bow like Daisy,” her then-three-year-old son Joseph Paul begged of her. Shappley knew the big red bow, ponytails and princess dresses were things almost every little girl wished for. However, these weren’t for a daughter — Shappley reminded herself these were the requests of her son.

“Please mommy,” Joseph Paul would plead with her.

His desire to dress in little girl’s clothes is a secret Shappley has kept from the outside world since Joseph was just a toddler. As an infant, she put him in blue clothes. As a toddler, she made him do what shes says is ‘typical boy stuff,’ like fishing, playing football with his siblings and throwing little boy’s birthday parties.

“We tried to make this kid be a boy,” said Shappley. Still, Joseph kept seeking out what the girls had and, by the age of three, he was telling everyone he was a girl.

A devout Christian, Shappley prayed while Joseph made shirts into skirts and begged to wear girls underwear — and asked his family to call him by the name of “Kai.”

“This hasn’t happened overnight for us. I am a Christian and I love the Lord,” Shappley said as she struggled with her son’s requests.

The gravity of her son’s pleas became almost too much to bear when she heard Kai praying to die.

“I overheard Kai praying and asking the Lord to please take Joseph home to be with Jesus and I realized Kai’s begging the Lord to let her die,” Shappley said through tears.

As a first step down the path to understanding Kai’s situation, Shappley bought girls underwear for Kai, though it took her three trips to the store to finally purchase them.

“When Kai came home that day and opened the drawer and saw princess panties, she fell down on the floor with the panties, crying and thanking me that this was the best day ever,” Shappley said.

Shappley sought out more help, turning to pastors and her faith. Her hope was that her young boy would act like one.

“So Christians are not gay, OK, that’s the mindset that I had.”

Shappley said faith leaders reassured her God doesn’t make mistakes.

“Christians are not going to have a transgender child, because as a Christian, that goes against everything that we read in scripture,” she said.

Finding Support for Parents of a Transgender Child

Feeling alone and isolated, Shappley dug into social media for help, finding a secret underground Facebook network of more than 2,000 other Christian mothers with transgender children. Shappley says she found support in the stories of other mothers who had faced criticism, some who had even been threatened by those who had vowed to take their children away or kidnap them.

“We knew that, at some point, if someone found out that our child was transgender, that you could put our safety at risk,” Shappley said.

Despite all the risks, acceptance has helped Shappley and Kai. She says her daughter is now thriving.

As for Shappley herself, the Facebook group for Christian parents of transgender youth was just the beginning of her journey to understanding and accepting Kai. Now five years old, Kai will soon enter the public school system in Pearland at the same time schools throughout the country work to meet the demands of an Obama administration directive that says transgender students are to be treated no differently than any other students.

In part two of this report, find out how Kimberly Shappley found herself in the middle of the controversial bathroom debate. Stay tuned to Eyewitness News and abc13.com for the rest of the story.

(Copyright ©2016 KTRK-TV. All Rights Reserved.)

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“The facility is expected to house about 700 detainees, including a separate 36-bed unit for transgender individuals,” said Carl Rusnok, a spokesperson for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE.)

ICE says the Prairieland Detention Center will open in November in Alvarado, Texas, and will operate with the agency’s most advanced care guidelines for transgender detainees. Each detainee will have an individualized detention plan “covering items such as searches, clothing options, hygiene practices, medical care, and housing assignments,” Rusnok said.

Immigrant rights advocates have urged ICE to release LGBT detainees, especially transgender women, because they are more vulnerable to physical and sexual assaults while in custody. The new facility addresses a number of issues to better protect trans women, but immigrant rights leaders say any new detention center is a step in the wrong direction. The advocates want ICE to instead work more closely with community groups that could house trans women.

“[ICE] is talking about the new detention center as if they are providing as a service to the community, and they’re not,” said Isa Noyola, the director of programs at the San Francisco-based Transgender Law Center.

ICE officials estimate that there are approximately 65 transgender women in their custody on any given night.

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The new facility will be operated and managed by Emerald Correctional Management, a private prison corporation that acknowledges on its website it is “ not the biggest” company in the private prison industry. The company, which manages a total of six facilities, distinguishes itself by saying it doesn’t “warehouse detainees” and that it’s changing the culture of privatization.

A Fusion investigation found that although only about 1 in 500 detainees are transgender, 1 in 5 victims of confirmed sexual assault in immigration detention were transgender in recent years. Many of the transgender individuals in detention are women who presented themselves as U.S. ports of entry to request asylum—women who have never committed a crime—and are detained until a judge can decide on their cases.

“These [detention] beds come with violence and unwarranted transphobic interactions with line staff and other folks in the facility,” Noyola said in a telephone interview with Fusion on Sunday.

A year ago in June 2015, 35 members of the House of Representatives sent a letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson urging him to end the detention of LGBT undocumented immigrants.

“These individuals are extremely vulnerable to abuse, including sexual assault, while in custody, in particular, transgender women housed in men’s detention facilities,” read the open letter addressed to Secretary Johnson.

The new detention center in Alvarado is located in a relatively small town of 4,000 residents about 40 miles southeast of Dallas. State officials say the estimated $42 million detention center project will generate more than 100 new jobs in Johnson County, according to the local paper Cleburne Times-Review.

Lawyers and advocates for transgender women say they’re concerned immigration attorneys may hesitate to take cases with clients in such a rural area.

“It’s trickier and more complicated for lawyers and advocates to gain access and get notices of folks being released,” said Noyola, of the Transgender Law Center.

Another significant concern for advocates is a fear of what happens to these transgender women when they’re released in Alvarado, Texas.

No one knows how the local Alvarado community will respond to news of transgender detainees being detained in their city. But many of the elected officials in the city of Alvarado and in Johnson County pride themselves in their conservative values. More than 25,000 of the county’s votes went to Republican candidates in the latest election, with the majority of votes going to Ted Cruz, the former presidential hopeful who believes allowing young transgender girls to use bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity is “lunacy.” (Fewer than 4,000 votes in the county for the Democratic candidates, who support more civil rights for transgender individuals.)

ICE officials say they will work with local LGBT organizations in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area “to secure needed assistance and resources from local legal service providers and groups who are able to provide additional programming for transgender detainees.”

According to one lawyer, immigration judges in the area seem to be less favorable to LGBT immigrants.

“ICE has shown over and over again that they’re incapable of detaining trans people with even minimal levels of dignity or safety,” said Olga Tomchin, a staff attorney at the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, an immigrant rights group.

“Rather than purposefully shipping trans immigrants to the [The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals] with some of the weakest asylum protections in the country, ICE must stop subjecting them to more violence and abuse,” Tomchin said.

In July 2015, ICE officials announced that a detention center in California would open a pod in a women’s facility that would accept transgender detainees. A few months later in December, ICE announced it was dropping those plans.

Currently ICE has one other facility with staff prepared to work with transgender women, but that facility will soon close. After a public pressure campaign that included a hunger strike, the city council of Santa Ana, California voted to not renew a contract that provided beds in the city jail to ICE. The ICE facility in the Santa Ana city jail is scheduled to close June 30, 2020.