The Wisconsin State Assembly passed three bills on Thursday that ban gender-affirming care for minors and limit transgender participation in sports. In order for the new bills to become state law, they must pass through the other chamber of Wisconsin’s legislature, the State Senate, and be signed by Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers. However, Evers stated on Thursday that he will not sign these bills into law.
The first of the three bills, Assembly Bill 465, prohibits health care providers from “medical intervention practices” on minors if done “for the purpose of changing the minor’s body to correspond to a sex that is discordant with the minor’s biological sex.” The bill defines “biological sex” as the “biological state of being female or male based on sex organs, chromosomes, and endogenous hormone profiles.”
The second bill, Assembly Bill 378, requires the University of Wisconsin only to allow intercollegiate, intramural or club sports teams that are all male, all female or coed. The bill defines sex as “determined by a physician at birth and reflected on the birth certificate.”
And the third bill, Assembly Bill 377, requires each school board, independent charter school and private school that operate or sponsor sports teams to designate the teams as all male, all female or coed. Bill 377’s definition of sex is identical to bill 378.
In response to the bills’ passage, Evers stated:
We continue to see harmful anti-LGBTQ rhetoric in Wisconsin—rhetoric that emboldens hate and violence and that we know only hurts our kids who are already facing significant mental health challenges. We’re going to stop these attacks, and we’re going to do it together.
Additionally, in response to the bills, executive director of the ACLU of Wisconsin Dr. Melinda Brennan stated, “All young people deserve to feel supported, valued and cared for, but the assembly representatives who voted in favor of these bills today sent a message to trans youth that they are the exception. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.”
The bills will now go to the Wisconsin State Senate. Last week, a Wisconsin state judge struck down a public school district policy that allowed students to request to transition to a different gender identity at school without parental consent and over parental objection.
