With the move, Kansas becomes the 27th state to enact laws restricting transgender procedures for minors.
The Republican-controlled Kansas Legislature has voted to override Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto of a bill banning gender-reassignment procedures for minors, making Kansas the latest state to enact restrictions on transgender surgeries and related procedures for children.
With supermajorities in both chambers, Republicans easily surpassed the two-thirds threshold required to overturn the Democrat governor’s veto. The Senate
voted 31–9, and the House followed with an 84–34 vote on Feb. 18, enacting Senate Bill 63 (SB 63), commonly referred to as the Help Not Harm Act.
The measure prohibits doctors from providing puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and gender-reassignment surgeries to minors diagnosed with gender dysphoria. The law takes effect later this month. It also strips state support for transition-related procedures and threatens the medical licenses of doctors who continue to provide such services.
Kelly, a Democrat,
vetoed the bill on Feb. 11, saying that it infringes on parental rights and warning of economic consequences. “Infringing on parental rights is not appropriate, nor is it a Kansas value,” she said in a statement at the time. “This legislation will also drive families, businesses, and health care workers out of our state, stifling our economy and exacerbating our workforce shortage issue.”
Kansas Senate President Ty Masterson and House Speaker Dan Hawkins issued a
joint statement saying they acted “in honor of the children Governor Kelly failed to protect with her repeated vetoes of this sensible legislation.” They described gender-altering procedures for minors as ”harmful, irreversible, and experimental“ and said the override was a ”victory for common sense.”
The Kansas Legislature’s action follows national efforts under the Trump administration to curb gender-reassignment procedures. President Donald Trump recently issued an
executive order to end federal support for such procedures, calling them tantamount to “chemical and surgical mutilation” that are part of a “dangerous trend” and a “stain on our Nation’s history.”
Several federal judges
blocked the order last week.
Trump also signed an
executive order declaring that it is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes—male and female—and that they are “not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”
“Across the country, ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers,” Trump’s order states. “This is wrong.”
The ACLU has
described that order as “requiring discrimination against transgender people across much of the federal government.”
