Today's Digital Newspaper

The Gazette

loader-image
weather icon 57°F


Kansas legislators impose sweeping anti-trans bathroom law

TOPEKA, Kan. • Republican legislators in Kansas have enacted what might be the most sweeping transgender bathroom law in the U.S. on Thursday, overriding the Democratic governor’s veto of the measure without having a clear idea of how their new law will be enforced.

The vote in the House was 84-40, giving supporters exactly the two-thirds majority they needed to override Gov. Laura Kelly’s action. The vote in the Senate on Wednesday was 28-12, and the new law will take effect July 1.

At least eight other states have enacted laws preventing transgender people from using the restrooms associated with their gender identities, but most of them apply to schools. The Kansas law applies also to locker rooms, prisons, domestic violence shelters and rape crisis centers.

“When I go out in public, like I’m at a restaurant or up on campus or whatever, and I need to go to the bathroom, there’s definitely going to be a voice in my head that says, ‘”Am I going to get harassed for that?’” said Jenna Bellemere, a 20-year-old transgender University of Kansas student. “It just makes it so much more complicated and risky and unnecessarily difficult.”

Republican legislators argued that they’re responding to people’s concerns about transgender women sharing bathrooms, locker rooms and other spaces with cisgender women and girls. They repeatedly promised that the bill would prevent that.

Kansas House Speaker Dan Hawkins, a Wichita Republican, told GOP colleagues after the vote that the override was “truly the icing on the cake” among conservative policy victories this year.

“I’m just giddy,” he said.

The Kansas law is different than most other states’ laws in that it legally defines male and female based on the sex assigned at birth and declares that “distinctions between the sexes” in bathrooms and other spaces serves “the important governmental objectives” of protecting “health, safety and privacy.”

Tags

[related_articles]

PREV

PREVIOUS

Dems, GOP dig in on debt-ceiling standoff after House action

WASHINGTON • The Senate showed no sign of moving to avoid a looming debt-ceiling crisis on Thursday, as Republicans rejected calls to raise the $31.4 trillion limit without conditions and Democrats dismissed the idea of talks. A day after the House of Representatives approved a Republican package that would lift the borrowing limit and slash […]

NEXT

NEXT UP

Pandemic sent high school sex to new low, survey finds

NEW YORK • The first years of the pandemic saw a huge decline in high school students having sex, according to a government survey. Teen sex was already becoming less and less common before COVID-19. About three decades ago, more than half of teens said they’d had sex, according to a large government survey conducted […]