Bills Advance To Restrict LGBTQ-Inclusive Practices At Schools, Hospitals, Shelters

Lawmakers in both chambers of the West Virginia Legislature advanced bills Thursday that center around LGBTQ identity in a variety of settings, from the classroom to health facilities to gender-specific emergency shelters.

These bills come as other state legislatures and the federal government take aim at things like gender identity, gender-affirming health care and protections from anti-LGBTQ discrimination.

And they have found traction among a significant number of lawmakers in this year’s legislative session.

Senate Bill 154: Discussing Identity At School

Senate Bill 154 seeks to prohibit public schools from providing instruction related to sexual orientation or gender identity.

But the bill would also require schools to report actions taken to affirm a student’s gender identity, like using their preferred pronouns, to their parents or guardians. Plus, it would allow for parents and guardians to take civil action against schools if impacted by violations of the new law.

Sen. Amy Grady, R-Mason, sponsored the bill. Grady said on the floor of the West Virginia Senate that the bill’s language would not preclude discussion of sexual orientation when relevant to a historical figure, or during disciplinary discussions surrounding bullying.

She said the bill was limited to instances in which a teacher or staff member deliberately tries to “socially transition” a student without parental consent.

On the Senate floor, Grady described a “social transition” as referring to a student by another name or sex. Neither the term nor its definition appear in the text of the bill.

“As a mom of three kids, I want to make the decisions that are mental health decisions and medical decisions for my kids,” Grady said. “As a teacher in our public schools, I don’t want to make these kinds of decisions for other parents. It’s not my decision to make.”

The lone vote against the bill came from Sen. Joey Garcia, D-Marion, one of two Democrats in the state Senate. He expressed concern that the bill would limit LGBTQ teachers and staff from expressing themselves, and potentially open schools up to litigation.

“What if somebody makes something up? What if hearsay is a part of the complaint process?” Garcia said. “Yeah, it might get dismissed, but there’s a lot of people’s lives [that] can be ruined in the meantime.”

Senate Bill 299: Gender-Affirming Care For Minors

In 2023, the state legislature banned nearly all gender-affirming care for minors, save a small number of exceptions for specific hormone therapies. The Senate moved one step closer to closing those exceptions Thursday with the passage of Senate Bill 299, sponsored by Sen. Chris Rose, R-Monongalia.

Sen. Laura Chapman, R-Ohio, presented the bill on the Senate floor Thursday. She argued that children who experience gender dysphoria — a feeling of distress that can occur when a person’s gender identity differs from their sex assigned at birth — should not receive hormone therapy treatments.

“We should treat these minors diagnosed with gender dysphoria, suffering from suicidality, with the same medications that we would give other children diagnosed with suicidality, including antidepressants,” Chapman said.

Chapman and several other Senators cited the walking back of pediatric gender affirming care in countries like Norway as evidence for the bill’s restrictions. 

“The United States is the most lenient when it comes to prescribing hormones and puberty blockers to children in the name of, quote unquote healthcare,” Chapman said. “England, Norway, Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden, former leaders in this untested and unproven healthcare have walked back the use of hormones and puberty blockers for minors. This is because of the inherent risks of infertility, osteoporosis, mood changes and alterations and growth patterns.”

However, reporting from the Associated Press and Politico in 2023, when such claims first began to appear in American political forums, found that such claims misrepresented recommendations made by an outside advisory board and Norway’s governmental body that develops health guidelines had not instituted any bans related to gender-affirming care for minors.

Garcia spoke in opposition of the bill, arguing that it contradicts other legislative attempts to uphold parental rights.

“It’s not a matter of just pushing this on a child or an adolescent and saying, ‘Hey, make this decision,’” he said. “This is a family decision, which is really how things should be — between a family and a doctor or medical professional. But we intervene here.”

Sen. Jack Woodrum, R – Summers, stood on the floor to explain why he supported SB 299 after supporting the exceptions in 2023’s House Bill 2007.

“This law has taken on a life of its own as it went. It’s turned into something that it’s not,” he said. “Very few people that have strong opinions ever read the exception in this.” 

Echoing comments made by Chapman, Woodrum also claimed that a pediatrician who testified before lawmakers in 2023 was later found to be a “political activist” based on her membership in the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, a non-profit organization devoted to transgender health.

“We can’t make good decisions on bad information. So the information that we were given at the time, a lot of which was provided to us by someone we now know was a political activist, had their own agenda,” Woodrum said. “There’s also been studies that have taken place since we passed this legislation the last time that prove out that this course of treatment is not the proper course of treatment to try to treat these children with these severe problems.”

Despite Garcia’s pushback, the bill was backed by the chamber’s Republican majority and passed along party lines. The bill now heads to the West Virginia House of Delegates for further consideration.

Senate Bill 456: State Definitions Of Sex

Meanwhile, members of the House advanced a Senate bill that would establish state definitions of “men” and “women” in the West Virginia Code.

Senate Bill 456 defines men as people with a “reproductive system” that has or does use “sperm for fertilization,” and women as people with a “reproductive system” that has or does use “ova for fertilization.” It says intersex people, or people with “differences in sex development,” do not constitute a separate group.

The bill says these definitions represent “unique and immutable biological differences” between men and women, which would be used to enforce who has access to “single-sex spaces” like gender-specific domestic violence shelters, restrooms, locker rooms and changing rooms.

Meanwhile, LGBTQ advocates and community members widely consider sex assigned at birth as distinct from gender identity, and argue that gender does not necessarily conform to sex assigned at birth.

The bill has already received the Senate’s stamp of approval, but the House adopted an amendment Thursday clarifying that it is illegal for anyone other than a trained medical professional to examine the sex of a minor without parental consent. The amendment was proposed by Del. J.B. Akers, R-Kanawha.

A second amendment proposed by Del. Kayla Young, D-Kanawha, aimed to expand that provision to adults as well.

“This bill purports to be about safety and privacy in spaces,” Young said on the House floor. “This amendment, all it does is says nothing in either of those sections may be construed to permit the inspection of genitalia of any adult or any child without parental consent.”

But Del. Brandon Steele, R-Raleigh, argued the amendment was logically flawed.

“I just don’t understand how an adult [whose] parents might have died could get parental consent for such an inspection, or why this would apply to an adult,” he said.

Young’s amendment was shot down by a verbal majority vote, limiting the protections to minors only.

If the amended Senate Bill 456 passes a third House reading, it will be sent back to the Senate for a last review before heading to the governor’s desk for final approval.