Wisconsin legislators are advancing bills to ban gender-affirming care for trans youth and restrict trans participation in school sports, even though Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has pledged to veto any such legislation.
The state Assembly approved three anti-transgender bills last Thursday, sending them on to the Wisconsin Senate. Two would bar trans girls and women from competing on female teams — one in K-12 public schools, the other in the University of Wisconsin system and technical colleges. The other would ban gender-affirming health care for the purpose of gender transition for people under 18. They all passed 65-35, Republicans for, Democrats against.
Even if Evers vetoes this bills, moving them forward remains “the right thing to do for Wisconsin families,” Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, a Republican, said at a news conference, the Associated Press reports.
He took issue with the idea that age-appropriate gender-affirming care, which is backed by every major medical association, is settled science. “It’s interesting if you go back in history, the way to treat mental illness 50 to 100 years ago was a lobotomy,” he said at the news conference. “And at the time that was settled science. That was just the way it was supposed to be. We can go back to example after example after example where the human mind has been opened to say there are different ways of doing things and it shouldn’t necessarily be a one-size-fits-all solution because we have settled science.”
Assembly Minority Leader Greta Neubauer, a queer Democrat, said Vos’s statements are “disgusting and completely misguided.”
“Transgender individuals deserve to be treated with respect and must be able to access the medical care that they and their care teams deem necessary,” she told the AP.
Another Democrat, Rep. Kristina Shelton, said of the sports bill, “The mere introduction of policy to separate children based on their identity is inherently disrespectful and harmful to the people we have pledged to serve. Their lives are not up for debate.”
Evers recently said he would veto any anti-trans or generally anti-LGBTQ+ bill that came to his desk. “We’re going to veto every one of them,” he told opponents of such bills earlier this month.
Twenty-two states have enacted bans on some or all gender-affirming care for trans minors — some of them blocked or struck down by courts — and 23 have restricted trans participation in school sports.
Pictured: Wisconsin legislators Greta Neubauer and Robin Vos
