GOP group says KY Gov. Andy Beshear supports surgery for trans kids. He says no.
One of the recurring Republican attacks on Gov. Andy Beshear this election year is that the Kentucky Democrat would allow children to receive gender-affirming surgeries.
It’s been alleged in an attack ad, by the Republican Party of Kentucky and by Beshear’s GOP rival, Attorney General Daniel Cameron.
But it’s not true, Beshear campaign spokesperson Alex Floyd told the Herald-Leader.
“Andy Beshear has always opposed gender-reassignment surgeries for minors — which do not happen in Kentucky,” Floyd said.
That basis for the attacks is centered around Senate Bill 150, an omnibus anti-trans bill passed by the General Assembly earlier this year that Beshear vetoed, only to be overridden by the GOP legislative supermajority. That bill, among many other things, banned gender-affirming surgeries for transgender youth.
“If Andy Beshear doesn’t support sex change surgery for minors he should have signed the bill that would ban sex change surgery for minors, plain and simple,” Republican Governors Association National Press Secretary Courtney Alexander said in a statement to The Herald-Leader. “Once again Andy Beshear is saying one thing while doing another, and Kentucky voters will continue to learn about Beshear’s far left record.”
The first commercial hit the airwaves in April, before this year’s gubernatorial primary concluded. It portended what has become the most common attack on Beshear’s record by stating that the Democratic governor “would allow sex changes for children as young as 8 to 9 years,” and that he “seems to think young children are ready to make decisions about permanently changing their gender.”
The ad was produced and aired by State Solutions, a political action committee tied to the RGA.
Additionally, a new commercial from another RGA-backed group, Kentucky Values, hit airwaves this month. It does not explicitly claim that Beshear supports gender-reassignment surgery, but does say he supports allowing school employees to “secretly help children change genders without telling their parents.”
As the narrator says that, text on the screen flashes an excerpt of a news story with the quote “gender reassignment surgery for anyone under 18.”
Now, after some courtroom back-and-forth, the gender-affirming care ban is in effect pending further litigation. Notably, the lawsuit that temporarily halted part of the legislation from being enforced only challenged the ban on puberty blockers and hormones — not surgeries.
The ban on gender-affirming surgeries was one of dozens of provisions in the bill to become law. That ban sits alongside a ban on puberty blockers and hormone therapies to assist minors in transitioning to a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth, as well as restrictions on instruction related to gender and sexuality in schools, among other things.
Beshear’s writings and comments on the matter indicate that, in certain situations, he believes it should be legal for minors to take reversible drugs to affirm their gender identity. But that doesn’t extend to surgeries, he reaffirmed at a Saturday campaign stop in Lexington.
“I’ve never been for gender reassignment surgeries, and they don’t happen in Kentucky. What I’m absolutely opposed to is tearing away the rights of parents to make critical and important medical decisions for their kids,” Beshear said. “Families should be making these decisions – not big government.”
Kentucky is one of several conservative states that has moved to ban gender-affirming care altogether in recent years. SB 150, despite near-unanimous GOP approval at the final vote, took a rocky path to passage in the legislature with many Republican legislators equivocating on a complete gender-affirming care ban.
Outside groups for and against the bill pressed hard on lawmakers, and a deal was struck to stitch parts of other bills into the final product at the eleventh hour of the legislative session.
Beshear, in his veto message against the bill, framed the final product as an overstep on the whole.
“Senate Bill 150 allows too much government interference in personal healthcare issues and rips away the freedom of parents to make medical decisions for their children,” Beshear wrote.
He also called gender-affirming care “an important means of improving health outcomes for the transgender population.”
Broadly defined, gender-reassignment surgery fits under the umbrella of “gender-affirming care.” But when asked, Beshear has said that he does not support allowing the surgery for minors in Kentucky.
Beshear’s stance aligns with that of LGBTQ rights advocacy groups that also opposed SB 150.
“Every LGBT organization in the Commonwealth said that we were absolutely fine with banning those sorts of surgeries for minors, Rebecca Blankenship, the executive director of Ban Conversion Therapy Kentucky, said on KET. “We might as well ban unicorn attacks; it makes no difference.”
That hasn’t stopped the Kentucky GOP or Cameron from using that line of attack, though.
“Andy Beshear and his liberal allies believe kids should have access to sex change surgery and drugs,” Cameron tweeted in June.
As recently as last week, the state party said Beshear is “way outside the mainstream” and not aligned with Kentuckians on this issue.
In a statement, RPK spokesperson Sean Southard cited a recent poll from YouGov and The Liberal Patriot substack showing “how unpopular Beshear’s position is on offering minor children access to drugs and surgeries to change their sex.”
“The YouGov poll found that on those issues, a plurality of voters in the United States support a ban on drugs and sex-change surgeries for minors as well as a ban on discussing gender ideology in public schools,” Southard said in the statement.
In the poll, 41% of respondents agreed that states should “ban all gender transition treatments for minors” and another 32% wanted states to “implement stronger regulations on puberty blockers (and) transition surgeries.”
This story was originally published July 19, 2023 at 8:37 AM.
