Democrat Governor of Kansas Laura Kelly vetoed a bill that sought to restrict access for transgender children to gender-affirming remedies.
The bill, passed mostly along party lines by both halls of the Republican-led Legislature, prohibits any entity receiving state money from providing or subsidizing gender-affirming solutions for adolescents.
Additionally, it forbids individuals or organizations that receive state funding, or state employees in their official capacity, from encouraging young people who have sex anxiety to seek health or social transition.
The bill prohibits Kansas’ Medicaid from reimbursing or providing coverage for trans youth’s gender-affirming therapies.
Additionally, it threatens to revoke a doctor’s license to practice gender-affirming treatments and makes them vulnerable to lawsuits from patients who undergo a medical change but afterward experience regret.
Kelly criticized the act as an overreach of the government, a violation of transgender people’s health privacy, and as an invasion of parental rights when she vetoed it.
She added that it was improper to condemn doctors for recommending the most recent, widely accepted, and most effective methods for treating gender dysphoria.
By enforcing federal directives on them and directing parents on how to best increase and care for their children, Kelly said in a statement, the controversial legislation targets a small team of Kansans. That is not a liberal value, in my opinion, and it is undoubtedly not a Kansas value.
“To be clear, this policy tramples parental rights,” Kelly continued. “The last place I would want to be as a legislator is between a family and a baby who needed any kind of health care. And, yet, that is precisely what this policy does.”
Kelly is currently in a fight with the Republican-led Senate, whose members might try to bypass her veto and pass the bill.
She vetoed a similar measure last year that prohibited trans athletes from competing in female-designated activities, but Republican legislators overrode her.
Kelly also vetoed a bill that would make it illegal for individuals to be “coerced” into having an abortion, which is so vague that it might punish individuals for only saying that they should consider having an abortion as an alternative, raising First Amendment issues, as well as a bill that would require more than a few questions to be included in existing surveys of people seeking out abortions, according to the Kansas Reflector.
Republicans were enraged by passages of all three charges, including that she had been accused of supporting the political left by Senate President Ty Masterson (R-Andover).
“The government has made it clear but again that the extreme left controls her veto brush,” Masterson said in a statement. “We look forward to overriding her vetoes when we return in two weeks because we are so committed to fanaticism.”
