Transgender youth in North Carolina lost access to gender-affirming treatments after the GOP-controlled assembly voted to override Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto.
Transgender youth in North Carolina on Wednesday lost access to the many credit as live-saving after the Republican-controlled General Assembly overrode the Democratic governor’s veto of that and others touching on gender in sports and classroom instruction.
GOP supermajorities in the House and Senate enacted —over Gov. Roy Cooper’s opposition— a bill barring medical professionals from providing hormone therapy, puberty-blocking drugs and surgical gender-transition procedures to anyone under 18, with limited medical exceptions.
The policy takes effect immediately, but minors who had begun treatment before Aug. 1 may continue receiving that care if their doctors deem it medically necessary and their parents consent.
North Carolina becomes the 22nd state to enact legislation restricting or banning gender-affirming medical care for trans minors. But most of those laws face legal challenges, and local LGBTQ+ right advocates have vowed to challenge the ban in court.
The Senate voted 27-18 to complete the veto override after an earlier House vote, 73-46.
Democratic Sen. Lisa Grafstein, North Carolina’s only out LGBTQ+ state senator, said the gender-affirming care bill “may be the most heartbreaking bill in a truly heartbreaking session.”
Some LGBTQ+ rights advocates in the Senate gallery began yelling after Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, who was presiding, cut off Grafstein to let another lawmaker speak. Several people were then escorted from the chamber by capitol police.
Sen. Joyce Krawiec, a Forsyth County Republican and chief sponsor of the bill restricting gender-affirming care, said the state has a responsibility to protect children from receiving potentially irreversible procedures before they are old enough to make their own informed medical decisions.
Earlier, the Senate and House voted minutes apart to override another Cooper veto of a bill limiting LGBTQ+ instruction in the early grades, also making that law.
