TOPEKA, Kansas (LifeSiteNews) — Kansas Republicans voted this week to override Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto of a bill to ban gender “transition” procedures on minors, ensuring the protection will take effect despite her objections.
As LifeSiteNews previously reported, the Help Not Harm Act, which prohibits transgender drugs and surgeries on children, allows for civil lawsuits against medical professionals who commit the procedures and prohibits state funding of them as well. Kelly was expected to veto and went on to do so.
On February 18, however, the Senate voted 31-9 to override that veto and the House voted 84-35 for the same.
“Denying the biological truth that we are either male or female hurts real people, especially vulnerable children,” responded Alliance Defending Freedom senior counsel Matt Sharp, director of the ADF Center for Public Policy.
Now and always, young people deserve the loving embrace of family members who guide them toward this truth rather than be subjected to risky, often irreversible, and life-altering experimentation and drugs. By overriding the governor’s misguided veto, the Kansas Legislature has taken a critical step to protect children from radical activists that peddle a gender ideology that sends kids down a one-way path of lifetime medicalization. No one has the right to harm children and, thankfully, states have the power – and duty – to protect them. Kansas joins the 26 other states and several European countries in fighting for truth and curtailing the deployment of harmful surgeries and drugs that are devastating countless lives.
A significant body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often-irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80 percent of children experiencing gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence, and that even full “reassignment” surgery often fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide – and may even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
Many oft-ignored detransitioners attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion that “transitioning” is the best solution.
“Gender-affirming” physicians have also been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with an 2022 exposé about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health, where Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money.”