A recently passed Kansas bill affirms that sex is immutable and children should be protected from damaging transgender drugs and surgeries, though it will likely need to survive a veto from the state’s Democratic governor.
TOPEKA, Kansas (LifeSiteNews) -- Kansas has moved one step closer to protecting children from permanently harmful transgender drugs and surgical procedures.
The legislature passed a bill last week to prohibit transgender drugs and surgeries and allow for civil lawsuits against medical professionals who commit the procedures. These surgeries could include cutting off healthy breasts or removing reproductive organs, causing lifelong problems with fertility, as well as creating damaging emotional issues.
The drugs and surgeries have been linked to suicidality, bone density loss, heart diseases, stroke, cancer, and numerous other medical problems. Puberty blockers can also cause infertility, as would be expected from drugs intended to stop normal pubertal development.
Senate Bill 63, the "Help Not Harm Act," prohibits state funding of the procedures.
The bill passed the state Senate with a veto-proof majority but not the House, according to the Kansas Reflector. Senator Dave Haley was the only Democrat to vote to protect minors from the procedures.
Republican Rep. Mark Schreiber joined Democrats in opposing the bill. He said he opposed the bill because of his daughter's rare heart condition. He also said the Mayo Clinic endorses the procedures, and he trusts them because they helped his daughter.
The bill would not ban medical care for kids with heart problems. It now heads to Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly's desk – she vetoed similar legislation last year and in 2023.
Chloe Cole, a woman who endured a double mastectomy as a 15-year-old and now warns about gender ideology, struck an optimistic tone about the bill's approval.
"Kansas is a key access state for child mutilation," Cole wrote. "The governor would most likely veto, but we are going to put immense pressure on the KS Legislature to override."Alliance Defending Freedom praised Kansas legislators for passing the bill.
“There are only two sexes — male and female — and denying this biological truth hurts real people," senior counsel Matt Sharp stated in a news release.
"Children who experience discomfort with their sex need the loving embrace of family, not risky drugs and life-altering procedures that send them down a one-way path of lifetime medicalization," he said. "In no world should children be subjected to harmful, often irreversible drugs and surgeries that block healthy puberty, alter hormonal balances, and remove healthy organs and body parts."The legislation follows other backlash against the gender ideology movement. For example, President Donald Trump recently signed an executive order ending taxpayer funding to institutions that commit the procedures.
"Across the country today, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions," President Trump's January 28 executive order stated. "This dangerous trend will be a stain on our Nation’s history, and it must end."The order has already stopped some hospitals from committing the procedures, as reported by The Washington Post.
The Supreme Court is set to release its opinion on the legality of states protecting kids from the irreversible procedures that falsely assert the idea that someone can change his or her sex. The Supreme Court heard arguments in December in the U.S. v. Skrmetti case.
As LifeSiteNews previously reported, conservative justices largely appeared sympathetic to the premise that the bans fell under states’ right to regulate medical procedures. Liberal justices, meanwhile, claimed that the prohibitions were akin to racism and were "discriminatory."
