Kansas bill to limit gender-affirming care for transgender minors dies after veto override fails

TOPEKA, Kan. A proposed ban on gender-affirming care for transgender minors in Kansas died Monday when two Republicans switched their votes and prevented the Republican-controlled Legislature from overriding the Democratic governor’s veto of the measure.

The Kansas House voted 82-43 to override Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto of a bill that would also prohibit public employees who work with children from promoting social transition for children who question or struggle with their gender identities. But supporters fell two votes short of the required two-thirds majority.

Republicans who supported the bill argued that a ban would protect vulnerable children from what they described as experimental health care that could create long-term health problems. Not only would it have banned surgeries for minors, but also puberty blockers and hormone treatments. The Senate voted Monday morning, 27-13, to override Kelly’s veto, the exact margin supporters needed.

Since Kelly vetoed the bill earlier this month, its critics have focused on the provision aimed at preventing public officials from advocating for social transition, which the bill said included “changing one’s pronouns or preferred manner of dress.” an individual.” made Kansas’ proposed ban more comprehensive than laws in other states.

“I can breathe,” Iridescent Riffel, a transgender LGBTQ+ rights activist who worked against the bill, said in an interview after the House vote. “I am relieved. I know a lot of other families in Kansas are,” said the 27-year-old from northeast Kansas.

LGBTQ+ rights advocates have questioned whether the social transition provision is written broadly enough to apply to public school teachers who demonstrate empathy for transgender students. Republican Party supporters rejected that argument, but the bill did not specify what constitutes promoting social transition.

“I think fear is the point,” said Taryn Jones, vice president of the LGBTQ+ rights group Equality Kansas after the House vote. “People in these professions would be too afraid to do anything they shouldn’t.”

About 300,000 young people between the ages of 13 and 17 identify as transgender in the US, according to estimates from the Williams Institute, an LGBTQ+ research center at UCLA Law. It is estimated that in Kansas around 2,100 young people in this age group identify as transgender. identify as transgender.

At least 200 Kansas health care providers signed a letter to lawmakers opposing the veto override. Transgender youth and parents of transgender children have described gender-affirming care as life-saving and argued that it decreases severe depression and suicidal tendencies. The care has also been endorsed by the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and other major US medical groups.

Republican state Reps. Jesse Borjon of Topeka and Susan Concannon of rural north-central Kansas said parts of the bill were too vague for them to vote to override Kelly’s veto after they both voted for the measure earlier this month. past.

The bill would give providers until the end of the year to phase out puberty blockers and hormone treatments for existing patients, but Borjon said he was troubled by how the bill would not have allowed those patients to continue their care after that.

In a brief speech explaining his “no” vote, Concannon told fellow Chamber members: “These decisions belong to the professional team and the parents.”

“Young people need our help and not the government’s excesses,” she added. “To everyone who has reached out, I hear you.”

The Kansas move was part of a broader effort to roll back transgender rights by Republican lawmakers in U.S. statehouses. Kansas would have been the 25th state to restrict or ban such care for minors, and this week, the South Carolina Senate was expected to debate a similar measure that has already passed the state House.

Supporters of the Kansas bill have repeatedly cited the recent decision by England’s National Health Service to stop covering puberty blockers as routine treatment for gender dysphoria in minors.

“Unfortunately, in today’s society, the particular predator is a woke healthcare system,” said Republican state Sen. Mark Steffen, a Central Kansas anesthesiologist and pain management specialist.

Republican lawmakers in Kansas last year enacted laws that ban transgender girls and women from participating in women’s college and middle school and high school sports teams and ended legal recognition of transgender residents’ gender identities. Transgender residents can no longer change the “sex” listing on their driver’s licenses or birth certificates to match their gender identities, something the Kelly administration has allowed.

The Legislature also passed a ban on gender-affirming care last year, but Kelly vetoed it, and GOP supporters did not have enough votes in either chamber to overturn her action. But support has surged this year as most previously skeptical Republicans have come on board.

Kansas Senate Health Committee Chairwoman Beverly Gossage, a Kansas City-area Republican, told her colleagues, “We are on the right side of history on this.”

State Rep. John Eplee, a family doctor from northeast Kansas and once a skeptic of the ban, said people are seeing children start to transition to a gender other than the one assigned at birth “more and more.”

“It’s time for Kansas to say, ‘Enough is enough. Let’s take a break from this,’” Eplee said during Monday’s House debate.

Democrats in both chambers resisted such arguments, and in the Senate, Democratic leader Dinah Sykes urged her colleagues to “demonstrate grace and kindness.”

Jenna Bellemere, a 21-year-old transgender student at the University of Kansas, said after the House vote that she is frustrated with efforts to roll back transgender rights and worries that people are becoming “desensitized” to attacks on the transgender community.

“I feel like we should be able to wait better.”