Louisiana governor John Bel Edwards has come out in strong opposition to anti-trans legislation as state lawmakers consider a raft of proposals targeting transgender youth.
On Monday, Edwards denounced bills seeking to limit medical care and educational opportunities for trans young people as “unnecessary” and “discriminatory.” Just eight days into the 2021 legislative session, GOP lawmakers have already introduced four such measures, the most extreme of which, House Bill 575, would criminalize doctors that provide gender-affirming care with a $10,000 fine and a prison sentence of up to two years. It would also force schools to out trans students to their parents.
As these legislative efforts await committee hearings, the Democratic lawmaker told members of the media that he is “hopeful that the legislature will not seek to advance those bills.”
“I am really concerned about emotionally fragile people and the idea that the weight of the state would be put behind something that to me is unnecessary and discriminatory and very hurtful for those individuals when there’s not a compelling reason to do it,” he said during a press conference.
Escaping a likely veto from Edwards may be a tough task, even despite the fact that the GOP control both houses of the legislature. To wield a veto-proof, two-thirds majority would mean that supporters of bills like HB 575 could only lose two votes in the state Senate and would need to pick up two votes in the House. If any House Republican flips, the legislation is effectively dead.
Other bills under consideration in the Louisiana State Legislature include a second anti-trans medical care ban, Senate Bill 104, which would require both parents to give written consent before a trans minor can receive treatments like hormones, puberty blockers, or “counseling or psychotherapy” that affirms their sense of self. According to Big Easy Magazine, the law would still apply “even if only one parent has custody” or either parent isn’t “an active part of their child’s life.”
Also on the table are two bills seeking to block transgender girls from playing on women’s sports teams in school: SB 156 and HB 542. Both proposed laws would apply to both K-12 and college sports and allow cisgender athletes to take legal action if they are forced to compete against trans female competitors.
LGBTQ+ advocacy groups have criticized these bills, claiming they are a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. As the Baton Rouge news publication The Advocate reports, the Louisiana High School Athletics Association (LHSAA) requires trans athletes to “undergo sterilization or surgery if they want to compete, restrictions that have resulted in zero trans players” at the high school level.
“If they’re not good-faith solutions to real problems, I can only guess we’re having this conversation to make it harder to be a trans young person in Louisiana,” Dylan Waguespack, board president of Louisiana Trans Advocates, told the publication.
As over two dozen states consider bills in 2021 identical to those put forward in Louisiana, other governors have joined Edwards in criticizing these proposals. Kansas governor Laura Kelly, also a Democrat, blasted an anti-trans sports bill after it passed both houses of the state legislature. Kelly has previously referred to SB 55 — which, like the Louisiana bills, specifically targets transgender female student athletes — as “regressive” and a “job killer.”
“I can tell you that we know from past experience not only what this will do, how it will make these kids feel, and how it might exacerbate some of the mental health issues that we’re already seeing,” the first-term lawmaker added this week, in comments reported by the local NBC affiliate KSNT.
Kelly has not announced an official veto of the legislation, but one of her first moves after taking office in 2019 was approving an executive order extending nondiscrimination protections to LGBTQ+ government workers. Although those protections were initially signed into law by Democratic governor Kathleen Sebelius in 2007, they were overturned by her GOP successor, Sam Brownback, in 2015.
Were Kelly to veto SB 55, it would be a death knell for the legislation. In the state House, the bill fell 7 votes shy of the two-thirds majority needed to override her objections.
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