Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed a bill on Tuesday that aims to ban gender affirming care for minors in the state.
Wichita State’s Student Government Association Sen. Evelyn Lewis said passing of the bill would only hurt the transgender community.
“This is going to make transitioning more complicated and much more complicated,” Lewis said. “Already, it takes too long as an adult to get gender affirming care.”
Kansas legislators recently passed the Help Not Harm Act which would ban access to gender-affirming care for minors.
With 88 Republicans in the House and 31 in the Senate this year, Republicans have the supermajority required to overrule the veto.
While Kelly vetoed the bill, the House and Senate could override it with a two-thirds vote from both bodies.
“If her veto gets overridden, we’ll have to wait and suffer through it,” Lewis said. “It’s terrible and it hurts a lot.”
If passed, the bill would restrict state funding for gender-affirming services and prohibit any health professional from providing care that is inconsistent with a minor’s assigned sex at birth. Physicians who provide any of these services would also face legal repercussions.
Ruby Godsey is the outreach chair for the Wichita State student organization Spectrum: LGBTQ & Allies. Godsey said this kind of care is invaluable for minors.
“It’s extremely important for youth to have access to these resources,” Godsey said. “As someone who’s been lucky enough to have started hormone therapy, it has impacted my life in a positive way.”
Lewis said even without legal limitations, it’s difficult to access this kind of care.
“Not many hospitals in Kansas support or offer that kind of care already and the drugs are very expensive,” Lewis said. “But a secondary effect of this bill is that it will encourage further discrimination of transgender people and transgender youth. That’s going to hurt them, too, maybe even more than the primary effect of the bill.”
Medications such as puberty blockers and transition surgeries would no longer be available to minors under the bill. Physicians who have already prescribed these medications to children would have until Dec. 31, 2025, to evoke prescriptions. All state-owned facilities and employees would also be prohibited from encouraging social transitioning.
According to the bill draft, social transitioning cannot be promoted by any state entity “except to the extent required by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution,” meaning individuals have the right to experiment with “acts other than medical or surgical interventions that are undertaken for the purpose of presenting as a member of the opposite sex, including the changing of an individual’s preferred pronouns or manner of dress.”
But Godsey worries the bill would serve as a gateway to more invasive legislation.
“The bill is called ‘Help Not Harm,’ but that’s the opposite of what they’re doing,” Godsey said. “It’s important that we understand that and that they (Kansas legislators) understand that, but there are still avenues that can help trans youth.”
There are several resources provided by the Wichita community in support of the LGBTQ+ community, including hotlines for mental health needs and The Center of Wichita, which provides a safe space with resources and educational opportunities for LGBTQ+ youth aged 13 to 18.
“With more people becoming aware of transgender people, I hope people may be able to find out they are transgender sooner than I did,” Lewis said. “They’ll be able to make support groups and support each other, but still this bill will just hurt people and make them suffer.”
