KY Senate Republicans remain divided over bill on gender transition for minors
The Kentucky Senate did not take a vote on a bill restricting gender-affirming care for transgender youth as expected Wednesday night after Republicans in the chamber showed just how contentious the issue is in their caucus.
With just three days left in the 2023 General Assembly — and only one day before the veto recess begins — time is running out for lawmakers to pass the legislation.
Anything passed in the final two days of session is at risk of being vetoed by Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear, who has signaled his displeasure with such anti-trans bills. But passage on Thursday, as long as the House concurred with those changes, would give the Republican supermajority the chance to override the veto.
In a 19-17 vote, a dozen Republicans voted with the chamber’s seven Democrats to adopt a significantly pared-down version of a bill that originally sought to ban all gender-affirming health care options for transgender youth and their families.
Under the new version filed late Tuesday night, Kentucky’s transgender youth and their families would be able to access some amount of gender-affirming health care, and doctors who provide it would no longer be threatened with a loss of license. The amendment, from Sen. Danny Carroll, R-Benton, replaced most of the contents of House Bill 470 from Rep. Jennifer Decker, R-Waddy.
But Day 27 of session came to a close Wednesday without a vote on the controversial bill after Sen. Gex Williams, R-Verona, moved to lay the bill on the clerk’s desk — a temporary postponement. That passed 19-17.
Senate President Robert Stivers, R-Manchester, said he can’t predict if the Senate will ultimately pass any kind of trans health care bill.
“I think there was a lack of knowledge as to what all the amendments in the subject matter meant,” Stivers, who voted against the amendment, said. “This is not the easiest of subject matter topics.”
Decker’s original bill passed the House earlier this month as a ban on virtually all “gender transition services,” including surgery, puberty blockers and hormones. Earlier this week, Republicans morphed it into a sweeping omnibus bill, packing in the contents of additional anti-LGBTQ bills that regulate guidance on the use of student pronouns, bathroom policies, curriculum about sexuality and gender identity.
Carroll’s version of the bill — two pages, compared with Decker’s 30 pages — leaves the content of those recent bill additions intact. But it strips much of the original content banning gender-affirming care and restores health care providers’ ability to prescribe “reversible puberty-blocking drugs” to a trans kid with parental permission — the current standard — as long as they’ve been formally diagnosed with gender dysphoria.
Gender dysphoria refers to the “psychological distress that results from an incongruence between one’s sex assigned at birth and one’s gender identity,” according to the American Psychiatric Association.
The revised bill still outlaws, however, gender-affirming surgery for a trans minor and the prescription of “cross-sex hormones,” including testosterone and estrogen.
Carroll’s amendment also removes the punitive actions patients and their families can take against health care providers they believe violated the law. Under the original bill, violating providers risked losing their license. The previous version of the bill would’ve also established a 30-year statute of limitations for a patient or their family to sue a doctor they believed violated the law. Both of these provisions were removed.
Notably, the original bill would’ve deemed a doctor who provided gender-affirming health care to a minor “unprofessional, unethical and unfit” — designations that are contrary to the evidence-based standard of care for trans youth backed by major medical associations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics. These designations, too, have been removed.
Carroll and a handful of other Republicans and Democrats, alike, criticized the hard-edged, hostile tone of the original bill in a Tuesday meeting of the Senate Families and Children Committee. They said it revoked medical providers’ ability to apply their expertise, which committee Chairman Carroll said made him “extremely uncomfortable.”
“When all is said and done, when you get away from all the noise surrounding these issues, it’s about those kids… We have got to make sure that the services are there to help them get through what they’re going through. I don’t care about any of the other issues, this decision was made to make sure that those kids had some options and that doctors were going to be comfortable treating them without all the fear that (HB) 470 portrayed,” Carroll told the Herald-Leader after filing the amendment.
This story was originally published March 15, 2023 at 10:50 PM.
