Missouri Republicans add trans bathroom ban to 'parents' rights' education bill

Missouri Republicans are trying to pass a “parents’ rights” education bill, which will mean more restrictions for LGBTQ+ students and on LBGTQ+ content, and this week they amended it to include restroom and locker room regulations for transgender students.

Trans students would be barred from using the facilities aligning with their gender identity under Republican Sen. Andrew Koenig’s amendment, the Missouri Independentreports. The Senate Education and Workforce Development Committee added the amendment Tuesday to Koenig's parents’ rights legislation, Senate Bill 728, and approved the entire bill, which would affect public, charter, and virtual schools. It will eventually go the full Senate.

“It is a statewide issue that your biological sex matches which locker room and which restroom you're going into,” Republican Sen. Nick Schroer said in the committee meeting. “I know several of the school districts in St. Charles County have addressed it, but there’s still a need.”

Several stand-alone bills on school restroom and locker room use are pending in Missouri as well. A House hearing on these bills “took up the majority of a nearly nine-hour meeting last week,” the Independent reports.

In the Senate committee, Democrat Greg Razer, Missouri’s only out gay state senator, tried to remove the amendment, but the committee’s Republican majority outvoted him.

The overall bill has numerous anti-LGBTQ+ provisions. It would force school staff to out LGBTQ+ students to their parents or guardians, saying they must be notified within 24 hours if a student “expresses confusion about their documented identity or requests to use personal pronouns that differ from their documented identity.”

It also says school officials must not encourage students under 18 “to adopt a gender identity or sexual orientation,” a provision that Razer said he found frankly mystifying. “My first thought was, Where is this happening?” he said in an earlier committee session, the Columbia Missourian reports.

In this week’s meeting, Razer pointed out that heterosexuality is a sexual orientation. “If the law says ‘sexual orientation or gender identity,’ say a boy says, ‘I want to take this girl on a date to the dance,’ then do they have to call?” he said, according to the Independent. “If that’s not the case, then what we’re saying in your bill is you only call if the student is like me.”

Koenig, who was recently stripped of his committee chairmanship due to infighting among Republicans, responded that he’s willing to clarify the bill. “What we don’t want is, we don’t want the teacher indoctrinating the child to make one decision or the other, or to specifically change names or pronouns,” he said.

Democrats in the legislature have objected to talk of teachers “indoctrinating” students, a baseless charge often made by conservatives. “Without teachers indoctrinating students, there are still conversations about students’ personal lives, who they like, who they want to take to the dance, and how they’re feeling at that moment,” Democratic Sen. Lauren Arthur said in Tuesday’s committee meeting. “By putting in statute requirements of the teachers to notify parents in conversations where I think we should allow them a little discretion to make the right call, it creates all sorts of additional problems.”

Razer said that parental notification puts children at risk of abuse or eviction from their homes if their parents are not supportive. He proposed an amendment saying the Missouri Department of Social Services must be notified as well. “If the parent is going to be notified, the department needs to be notified that they may have a homeless child or an abused child on their hands,” he said. But Republicans said the amendment was unnecessary, as the department is already contacted if there’s suspicion of abuse, and that it assumes the worst in parents.

Pictured: Missouri Sen. Nick Schroer