RALEIGH (LifeSiteNews) — North Carolina Democrat Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed a trio of Republican-backed bills on Wednesday concerning transgenderism and minors, setting up yet another veto override showdown with the GOP legislature.
The first bill forbids “gender transitioning” surgical or chemical procedures from being administered to anyone under age 18. The second excludes males from middle- and high school as well as collegiate sports’ teams meant specifically for women and girls. The third prohibits LGBT material from school curricula and requires that parents be notified if their children begin identifying as the opposite sex.
Cooper vetoed all three measures Wednesday, WRAL reports, accusing Republicans of “using government to invade the rights and responsibilities of parents and doctors, hurting vulnerable children and damaging our state’s reputation and economy like they did with the harmful bathroom bill.”
“Parents know what is best for their children,” responded Republican state Sens. Amy Galey and Michael Lee. “Gov. Cooper continues to mislead the public about the Parents’ Bill of Rights so he can drum up manufactured outrage and rake in donations. This bill encourages collaboration, promotes transparency, and keeps classrooms focused on educating, not indoctrinating. The Democrats and Gov. Cooper think the government can co-parent, but Republicans will always stand strong to defend parents and families.”
Evidence shows that “affirming” confusion about one’s biological sex carries severe harms, especially when such affirmation takes the form of physically transformative procedures on impressionable children who cannot fully grasp the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them.
Studies find that more than 80% 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,” individuals who attempted to live under a different “gender identity” before embracing their sex, 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.
The danger of keeping parents in the dark about such situations is grimly illustrated in the story of Yaeli Martinez, a 19-year-old to whom “gender transitioning” was touted as a possible cure for her depression in high school, supported by a high school counselor who withheld what she was going through from her mother. The troubled girl killed herself after trying to live as a man for three years.
Meanwhile, mandatory inclusion of gender-confused individuals in opposite-sex sports is promoted by the left as a matter of “inclusivity,” but critics note that indulging “transgender” athletes undermines the original rational basis for having sex-specific athletics in the first place, thereby depriving female athletes of recognition and professional or academic opportunities.
There have been numerous high-profile examples in recent years of men winning women’s competitions, and research affirms that physiology gives males distinct athletic advantages that cannot be fully negated by hormone suppression.
In a 2019 paper published by the Journal of Medical Ethics, New Zealand researchers found that “healthy young men [do] not lose significant muscle mass (or power) when their circulating testosterone levels were reduced to (below International Olympic Committee guidelines) for 20 weeks,” and “indirect effects of testosterone” on factors such as bone structure, lung volume, and heart size “will not be altered by hormone therapy;” therefore, “the advantage to transwomen [biological men] afforded by the [International Olympic Committee] guidelines is an intolerable unfairness.”
North Carolina Republicans and their allies expect the legislature to override Cooper’s vetoes, as it did in May with a law to ban most abortions at 12 weeks.