During her first months in kindergarten, Kai Shappley brought home a note to her mom. A teacher wanted Kimberly Shappley to know that Kai had been a joy to have around - she was "such a sweet little GIRL."

Those four letters, in all caps, were a coded message: We get it.

Her teachers, neighbors and classmates know that 6-year-old Kai is transgender because Kimberly Shappley has been a public advocate for policies that respect children's gender identity. Shappley urged the Pearland ISD board last summer to change its bathroom access policy, and she has spoken at news conferences on the issue. A video posted online explores, in intimate detail, her struggle to come to terms with her daughter's reality.

Shappley thrust her family into the public eye as part of a national debate over a sensitive social issue. Yet that teacher's note suggests that the best opportunities to change attitudes may lie in quiet interactions that happen every day.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has been leading a high-profile charge for a law that would require Texans to use bathrooms in public schools, government buildings and public universities based on "biological sex." Headlines ensue.

Privately, around the country, more of us are getting to know transgender people, including kids like Kai. This shifts the issue from the abstractions of political debate to the tangible reality of a new friend or a delightful child. Understanding and tolerance bloom. Suddenly, we get it.

But here's the catch: This transformation can only happen if transgender people - and the parents of transgender children - are open about who they are.

It can't be easy for Kimberly Shappley to talk publicly about private family matters, but she does so because she wants laws and policies and attitudes to change. A teacher who saw Kai as just another kid in the classroom wouldn't have put "girl" in all-caps.

"The staff at the school could not be better," Shappley told me this week. "They have taken the time to get to know my child, and I believe that hearts and minds are changing,"

Kai has had some tough moments since she started kindergarten in the fall.

One day she came home in a bad mood and started crying when her mom asked how her day had gone. She had been in the library and needed to use the restroom, and someone escorted her to the nurse's office. (This is the accommodation offered by Pearland ISD; it doesn't permit Kai to use the girls' restroom.)

The nurse was out. The office was locked.

"At that moment, no one could figure out where this kid could use the bathroom," Shappley recalled. "So she peed on the floor."

Shappley says she is aware of six transgender children in Pearland ISD. But their parents mostly have kept them "in the closet," she says. This reflects an understandable desire to protect a child from the pain associated with being different, but it frustrates Shappley because it increases the burden on her and Kai.

Recent surveys show the depth of the challenge facing families like the Shappleys, along with the activists at organizations like Equality Texas working on their behalf.

A University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll last fall found that 51 percent of Texas voters believed transgender people should use public restrooms based on their birth gender; 31 percent said it should be based on their gender identity; and the rest had no opinion. The margin was much greater - 76 percent to 14 percent - among self-identified Republican voters.

But other recent polls are also instructive. According to the Pew Research Center, Americans opposed same-sex marriage by a margin of 57 percent to 35 percent in 2001. Fifteen years later, 56 percent supported same-sex marriage while 37 percent opposed it.

In a poll last September, Pew found that 87 percent of American adults knew someone who was gay; just 30 percent said they were acquainted with a transgender person.

Perhaps Kai Shappley was the first transgender person that kindergarten teacher had ever met - or at least, the first person she knew was transgender.

We fear what we don't know. When more parents come forward as Kimberly Shappley has, an idea like the so-called "bathroom bill" - taking aim at the imagined problem of predators stalking women and girls in bathrooms - will seem as foolish as laws that limited the choice of a marriage partner. Such measures will be seen as relics of a less-enlightened age.

Kai will be an adult in about 15 years. Let's see if we can pull this off before then.