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TOPEKA (United States), April 21 (AP) — The Democratic governor of Kansas on Thursday vetoed Republican legislation aimed at ending gender-affirming care for children and teens, along with another sweeping Republican proposal that would Their gender identity in preventing transgender people from using bathrooms and other gender-related public facilities.
Gov. Laura Kelly’s actions underscore how her Republican-leaning state has become a hotly contested battleground as Republican lawmakers across the country target LGBTQ+ rights with hundreds of proposals.
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Kelly narrowly won re-election in November, but the legislature has a solid Republican majority and conservative leaders who have made dismantling transgender rights a priority.
As of Wednesday, at least 14 Republican-led legislatures had enacted laws banning gender-affirming care for minors, including North Dakota. At least seven have bathroom laws, mostly in schools. Earlier this month, Kansas lawmakers overturned Kelly’s veto to bar female transgender athletes from women’s and women’s sports, making Kansas one of at least 21 states with such laws.
Kansas’ restroom bill would apply to restrooms and locker rooms outside of schools, as well as prisons, jails, rape crisis centers and domestic violence shelters. Because it also seeks to define “sex” as “male or female at birth,” transgender people will not be able to change the gender marker on their driver’s license, although a 2019 federal court order still allows them to change their birth certificates .
Advocates for LGBTQ+ rights see the measure as legitimately stigmatizing transgender people and refusing to recognize people who are nonbinary, gender fluid or gender nonconforming.
“I’m not going back to those days of hiding in the closet,” Justin Brace, executive director of the Kansas Transgender Organization, said at a recent transgender rights rally outside the state capitol. “We are literally fighting for our lives.”
Kelly’s veto on Thursday was in line with a public pledge to block any measure she believes discriminates against LGBTQ+ people. She also argued that the move to eliminate LGBTQ+ rights would harm the state’s efforts to attract businesses.
The bathroom bill, passed earlier this month, appears to have the two-thirds majority needed to override the veto, although the margin in the House is narrow. A bill on gender-affirming care is short in the House.
Republican conservatives argue that many of their constituents reject cultural shifts in which people’s gender identities may differ from their birth sex; don’t want cisgender women to share bathrooms and locker rooms with trans women; question puberty-blocking drugs, hormone therapy, and surgery, among other things Gender affirming care.
“Their parents said my kids didn’t show signs of gender dysphoria until middle school, and then they started using social media,” Rep. Susan Humphreys, a Wichita Republican, said during a debate on gender affirmation. The Care Act, which promotes the “social contagion” narrative debunked by multiple studies.
The Kansas measure would require the state’s medical board to revoke the license of any doctor found to provide such care and allow people who received such care as children to later sue health care providers.
Supporters said the bill would not prevent transgender youth from receiving counseling or psychotherapy. But the measure also applies to conduct that “causes” “confirmation of the child’s perception of the child’s sex” if it is different from the sex assigned at birth.
Treatment for children and adolescents has been practiced in the United States for over a decade and is endorsed by major medical societies.
“It’s one thing to have a family member who isn’t sure who you are,” says Derek Jordan, a licensed therapist who works with transgender youth and directs the Ackerman Institute for Gender and Family in New York. project to train child and family therapists. “It’s a whole other thing to have a system tell you that you’re not fully human, or that you don’t have the same rights as everyone else.”
Kansas’ restroom bill borrows language from proposals from several anti-trans groups. It said the “important government objective” of protecting health safety and privacy justified separate public facilities for men and women and applied where “biology, safety or privacy” promoted gender separation. It defines male and female based on a person’s reproductive anatomy at birth.
Brenda Landwehr, chairman of the Kansas House Health Committee, told colleagues who opposed the bill during debate that they told her she couldn’t go into the bathroom and knew it was only for cisgender women.
“What about my rights? What about my comfort zone?” said Randwell, a Wichita Republican. “Where are my granddaughters?” (AP)
(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the content body may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)
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