National
New York Times called out for coverage of transgender people
GLAAD billboard circled newspaper’s Manhattan headquarters on Wednesday morning
In a one-two punch aimed directly at the New York Times; more than 100 contributing writers, fellow journalists, celebrities and advocacy organizations today joined GLAAD in demanding change in how the newspaper covers transgender issues and trans people.
First, GLAAD hired a billboard truck to circle the newspaper’s Manhattan headquarters this morning with signs saying, “Dear New York Times: Stop questioning trans people’s right to exist and access to medical care,” among other messages.
“I think what what’s most upsetting here is the damage this is doing,” Sarah Kate Ellis, GLAAD CEO and president of the world’s largest LGBTQ media advocacy organization, told the Washington Blade in her first phone interview on the topic Tuesday. “Every day they’re not stopping is doing more damage. Every time a new article comes out that debates whether or not trans people should receive board-approved healthcare is damaging. And so I feel really strongly that their coverage is dangerous.”
Then, to protest what GLAAD calls the Times’ “irresponsible, biased coverage of transgender people,” representatives of the organization joined contributors for the Times outside the paper’s building this morning, as they delivered two open letters and issued a joint statement, calling out a “pattern of inaccurate, harmful trans coverage.”
The coalition demands the Times immediately “stop printing biased, anti-trans stories,” meet with members and leaders in the trans community within two months, and within three months hire at least four trans writers and editors as full-time members of the Times staff.
Joining GLAAD are the Human Rights Campaign, PFLAG, the Transgender Law Center, Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Women’s March, director Judd Apatow, comedian Margaret Cho, actor Wilson Cruz, actresses Tommy Dorfman, Lena Dunham, Jameela Jamil, drag superstar Peppermint, activist Ashlee Marie Preston, Jeopardy! champion Amy Schneider, writer/director/actress Shakina, actress, Instagram influencer and stepmom to Zaya, Gabrielle Union-Wade, TV personality Jonathan Van Ness, activist Charlotte Clymer and more.
“This has been an effort at GLAAD for over a year now,” Ellis told the Blade. “We’ve had several off-the-record meetings with the New York Times to share with them our concerns about the coverage and the reporting that they’ve been doing on the trans community.”
But those concerns fell on deaf ears, said Ellis, and the conversations were unfruitful. “We wouldn’t be going out with a public letter in coalition if they were fruitful. You know, for us going public, it’s always the last resort.”
Times Journalists Speak Out
As GLAAD worked toward publishing its letter, the organization was contacted by Times contributors already in the process of composing their own. A core team of eight journalists collaborated to condemn what they called the newspaper’s anti-trans bias and the real-world impact of that transphobic coverage.
The authors are Times freelancers Harron Walker, Eric Thurm, who is also campaigns coordinator at the National Writers Union and a steering committee member of the Freelance Solidarity Project, Sean T. Collins, who is also a member and organizer of the Freelance Solidarity Project, Cecilia Gentili, a longtime trans activist, Jo Livingstone, Muna Mire, and Chris Randle, a member of the steering committee at the Freelance Solidarity Project.
They were joined by Olivia Aylmer, a member of the steering committee at the Freelance Solidarity Project who is not a freelancer for the Times.
Not only did other contributing writers sign-on, but so did journalism colleagues, both cisgender and trans, as well as members of the Trans Journalists Association.
“A diverse group of people came together to bring you this complaint,” they wrote. ”Some of us are trans, nonbinary, or gender nonconforming, and we resent the fact that our work, but not our person, is good enough for the paper of record. Some of us are cis, and we have seen those we love discover and fight for their true selves, often swimming upstream against currents of bigotry and pseudoscience fomented by the kind of coverage we here protest.”
Those signing that letter include Ashley P. Ford, Roxane Gay, Carmen Maria Machado Thomas Page McBee, Andrea Long Chu, Carmen Maria Machado, John Cameron Mitchell, Zach Stafford, Raquel Willis and Maia Monet, among others.
Their letter, addressed directly to Times Standards Editor Philip Corbett, calls out the country’s third most-read paper for executing what it says is “poor editorial judgment,” repeated lack of context in its reporting on trans issues and following “the lead of far-right hate groups in presenting gender diversity as a new controversy, warranting new, punitive legislation.”
“There is in fact an unethical bias against trans people and transnesss within its coverage of trans issues, by and large,” said Walker, one of the organizers of the contributors’ letter. “There is a pattern of bias, and it’s a violation of the standards own policy as laid out by the standards desk.”
States that have seized upon this anti-trans reporting and opinion pieces by the Times include Alabama, Arkansas and Texas. Already, those states have joined Florida, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee and Utah in enacting discriminatory legislation.
Of these, Utah and South Dakota have passed healthcare bans that journalist Erin Reed calls “exceedingly cruel.” For example, South Dakota’s ban is one of those providing specific provisions on how to medically detransition trans teenagers, a practice now state law in Alabama and Arkansas.
“The New York Times coverage is feeding into defending these laws, by virtue of the fact that it’s the so-called paper of record,” Walker told the Blade. “It has one of the largest reaches of any newspaper in the world, it is respected. Even if people on the far right may dismiss it as the ‘failing New York Times,’ it still holds a legitimacy in a process that, you know, means something.”
‘Pattern of bias’
“Plenty of reporters at the Times cover trans issues fairly,” the contributing writers’ letter states. “Their work is eclipsed, however, by what one journalist has calculated as over 15,000 words of front-page Times coverage, debating the propriety of medical care for trans children published in the last eight months alone.”
GLAAD notes that officials in Texas quoted Emily Bazelon’s June 2022 report to go after families of trans youth in court documents over their private, evidence-based healthcare decisions.
Former Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge cited three Times articles in her amicus brief supporting an Alabama law that criminalizes doctors and parents for ensuring trans youth can access necessary medical care: Bazelon’s 2022 story, Azeen Ghorayshi’s January 2022 piece, and Ross Douthat’s April 2022 op-ed.
The Times’ reporting on trans youth and its reputation as the “paper of record” was cited just last week to justify a bill in a Nebraska legislative hearing, that would criminalize healthcare for trans youth.
Scores of other bills are in the works. Missouri Republicans are once again pushing for healthcare bans. Anti-trans bills in Montana, West Virginia and Mississippi have passed an entire chamber.
But by far the worst anti-transgender legislation and existing laws against the trans community are already on the books in Texas, which Reed calls “home to the weaponization of [Department of Protective Family Services] against transgender people.”
New restrictive bathroom laws are in place in Oklahoma, Alabama and Tennessee. Oklahoma’s healthcare ban restricts even adults, up to the age of 26, from accessing gender-affirming care. Florida has banned Medicaid coverage for trans-related healthcare for adults and is banning gender affirming care for trans teens. And as mentioned earlier, Utah, South Dakota, Arkansas and Alabama have targeted trans teens as well.
‘Britification’ of American media
For the most part over the last two decades, U.S. media had reliably shared a positive view of transgender people, especially youth, highlighting the stories of out trans celebrities like Chaz Bono, Laverne Cox, Caitlyn Jenner and Jazz Jennings. But since the Obergefell decision at the U.S. Supreme Court in 2015, trans people have become the religious right’s handy-dandy political boogeyman, to scare the flocks, rally the base and get out the vote. That’s a shift that was preceded by all-out negative coverage of trans issues in the U.K., where with rare exception the mainstream media is in lockstep with what is called the “Gender Critical” movement, opposing trans rights.
Ari Drennen is the LGBTQ program director for Media Matters, and has been tracking coverage of trans issues at the Times.
“I think it’s good to see people speaking up and talking about the really troubling pattern of coverage coming out of the Times, just because the Times is seen as the kind of gold standard for a lot of mainstream liberals,” Drennen told the Blade. “That pattern is especially notable at the Times. But there has been a sort of, you know, Britification, for lack of a better word, of the American media’s approach to trans people.”
Drennen cites a Reuters article from October about gender-affirming care for trans children that featured an extreme close-up photograph of a child wearing braces with a hormone pill on their tongue. “That was really just clearly intended to scare parents,” she said.
Also keeping a close watch on the Times and this Britification effect is Alejandra Caraballo, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, where she works to advance the civil rights of LGBTQ people in a variety of civil legal contexts such as healthcare access, immigration and family law.
“In the U.K., the far right, particularly the religious far right, is almost a non-entity. They just don’t have the kind of cultural power and political power that they do in the United States,” Caraballo told the Blade, noting that the Gender Critical movement has taken a a more secular approach to its opposition to trans people, rather than a religious angle.
“In the United States, it’s always been the religious far right, but they are now trying to launder those narratives through these kind of secular outlets, to try to make it seem that the concerns aren’t just inherently based on religious ideology,” she said. “Part of it is this concerted strategy that I think a lot of the Gender Criticals have of particularly appealing to narratives that upper middle class white women would often be more amenable to, especially this idea that women have fought for rights, and somehow the existence of trans people is undermining those rights, because it’s hard to just oppose rights for people if it doesn’t impact you, so you have to create a sense of scarcity, and that’s what they do there. They say that ‘This is erasing women,’ ‘This is erasing women’s rights.’”
Racial bias
Caraballo noted that the people who are writing these stories at the Times are almost universally upper middle class, middle-aged white women, which speaks to the lack of racial diversity at the newspaper.
“I think what’s interesting is the kind of subject of every panic about over-medicalization in mainstream media tend to be white, and then the subject of the panic about kids and sports tend to be Black,” said Drennen. “I don’t need to have a Ph.D to see what’s going on.”
“I think part of it speaks to the lack of racial diversity,” echoed Caraballo. “I’m not surprised that one of the first really positive, outspoken editorials in the opinion column in the New York Times was by a Black man. I think there’s a sense of solidarity and understanding of how these things work, and I think when you have no trans people in the newsroom and no trans people as opinion columnists, and you have a newsroom that’s almost entirely stocked with a demographic that is particularly being targeted by Gender Criticals for pushing their views. I think it’s not a surprise.”
Anti-trans agenda
Caraballo said her conversations with people who work at the Times leads her to suspect this shift toward anti-trans narratives is not the writers or reporters themselves, but the result of an agenda set by their editors.
“For some people like Katie J.M. Baker, who has written extensively about how the media actually works to push transphobic narratives, to then write an article like she did about forcibly outing trans students, it just speaks to either opportunism, not really having a deeply-held belief about this, or just being pushed by the editors. I mean, this was her first major story,” she said. “I worry that what happens is the New York Times often times gives those kinds of views credibility. And you see this with the anti-trans people celebrating every one of these articles, because they view that they’re trans eliminationist and anti-trans positions are being laundered into the mainstream.”
Anti-trans tipping point
In 2014, Time Magazine put Laverne Cox on its cover and declared that trans Americans had achieved a tipping point in acceptance. But at the Times, a shift in who writes opinion pieces has tipped the balance the other way, noted Drennen.
“The New York Times has never been perfect in their coverage, of course. But over the last year, Jennifer Finney Boylan departed from the Times’s opinion section,” she said. While Boylan is still a freelancer for the Times, the bestselling author and scholar’s byline now regularly appears in the Washington Post.
“In the interim, they’ve added two incredibly anti-trans regular columnists, Pamela Paul and David French, the former lawyer for the anti-LGBTQ+ hate group, the Alliance Defending Freedom. This has a really troubling pattern of anti-trans sentiment. So, any perceived balance there was just got totally blown out the window over the last year.”
“I’m proud of the work I did for Times Opinion from 2007 to 2022, on hundreds of topics from presidential dogs to the history of the Negroni,” Boylan told the Blade. “As a freelancer, I felt lucky to have a regular slot on the page and was grateful for the trust the editors placed in me. I also wrote many essays about trans identity and trans politics, and was proud to be, for many years, the only ongoing voice on the page representing the wide range of trans identities. I am hoping all those stories put a human face to trans issues for readers of the Times, and opened some hearts.”
Boylan’s name does not appear alongside other Times freelancers in the open letter or the GLAAD letter, but ironically, the Times has been publishing her name in its Bestsellers list for 18 weeks in a row. Her novel, Mad Honey, co-written with Jodi Picoult, has yet to be reviewed in the newspaper or covered in any way, despite it being the most successful book co-written by any transgender person, ever. Is that more evidence of bias, or just a coincidence?
The science ‘debate’
“I am really disappointed that it’s come to this,” said Ellis. “The science is settled on transgender health care. As far as the New York Times is concerned, it is not settled science and they want to use their pages to debate it.”
“It’s so dehumanizing,” added Caraballo, “because you have people debating your rights who have no stake in it whatsoever. They’re not the ones that are going to be denied healthcare. They’re not the ones who are going to be denied housing. They’re not the ones who are going to be kicked out of their homes when they’re forcibly outed to their parents. They have no stake in this. And that is particularly what’s so upsetting, to see all these people that literally will never feel the effects of these policies, constantly talking about how they have ‘concerns.’”
Will the Times agree to their demands?
Drennen said it’s hard to say whether these open letters will have any impact, because “so much of their decision-making is internal.”
For her part, Walker said she remains excited by the coalition that’s been assembled and optimistic, but also realistic.
“Ideally what happens is the New York Times says, ‘Okay, yeah, let’s stop debating whether trans people should be allowed,’ and they start hiring a bunch of trans people. It’s the end of the story. I’m also realistic. I think it’s important to keep some idealism and some optimism in place and also realistic at the same time, which I also think is important. And I fully expect them to do their best to ignore it.”
“We’re too loud to ignore. If you ignore our letter, we’ll find some other way. If you ignore that, we’ll find another way,” Ellis said. “We’re not going to quit until the New York Times acknowledges our demands. And our demands are not outrageous. Within the letter, we’re just talking about stopping your irresponsible reporting, meeting with the trans community and hiring trans writers and editors. These are not outrageous demands that we’re making.”
Charlie Stadtlander, the director of external communications, newsroom, for the Times responded Wednesday afternoon in an email to the Blade addressing the controversy:
“We received the open letter delivered by GLAAD and welcome their feedback. We understand how GLAAD and the co-signers of the letter see our coverage. But at the same time, we recognize that GLAAD’s advocacy mission and the Times’s journalistic mission are different.
As a news organization, we pursue independent reporting on transgender issues that include profiling groundbreakers in the movement, challenges and prejudice faced by the community, and how society is grappling with debates about care.
The very news stories criticized in their letter reported deeply and empathetically on issues of care and well-being for trans teens and adults. Our journalism strives to explore, interrogate and reflect the experiences, ideas and debates in society — to help readers understand them. Our reporting did exactly that and we’re proud of it.”
Read the letters and who signed them by clicking here.
The U.S. has granted asylum to a Guatemalan LGBTQ activist who fled his country in 2019.
Estuardo Cifuentes and his partner ran a digital marketing and advertising business in Guatemala City.
He previously told the Washington Blade that gang members extorted from them. Cifuentes said they closed their business after they attacked them.
Cifuentes told the Blade that Guatemalan police officers attacked him in front of their home when he tried to kiss his partner. Cifuentes said the officers tried to kidnap him and one of them shot at him. He told the Blade that authorities placed him under surveillance after the incident and private cars drove past his home.
Cifuentes arrived in Matamoros, a Mexican border city that is across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas, in June 2019. He asked for asylum in the U.S. based on the persecution he suffered in Guatemala because of his sexual orientation.
The Trump administration forced Cifuentes to pursue his asylum case from Mexico under its Migrant Protection Protocols program that became known as the “remain in Mexico” policy.
Cifuentes while in Matamoros ran Rainbow Bridge Asylum Seekers, a program for LGBTQ asylum seekers and migrants that the Resource Center Matamoros, a group that provides assistance to asylum seekers and migrants in the Mexican border city, helped create.
The Biden-Harris administration in January 2021 suspended enrollment in MPP. Cifuentes entered the U.S. on March 3, 2021.
“We are profoundly relieved and grateful that my husband and I have been officially recognized as asylees in the United States,” Cifuentes told the Blade on Monday in an email. “This result marks the end of a long and painful fight against the persecution that we faced in Guatemala because of our sexual orientation.”
Vice President Kamala Harris is among those who have said discrimination and violence based on sexual orientation are among the root causes of migration from Guatemala and other countries in Central America.
Cifuentes is now the client services manager for Lawyers for Good Government’s Project Corazón, a campaign that works “hard to reunite and defend the rights of families impacted by inhumane immigration policies.” He told the Blade he will continue to help LGBTQ asylum seekers and migrants.
“In this new chapter of our lives, we pledge to work hard to support others in similar situations and to contribute to the broader fight for the rights and acceptance of the LGBTQ+ migrant community,” said Cifuentes. “We are hopeful that our story will serve as a call to action to confront and end persecution based on gender identity and sexual orientation.”
U.S. Supreme Court
US Supreme Court rules Idaho to enforce gender care ban
House Bill 71 signed in 2023
BY MIA MALDONADO | The U.S. Supreme Court has allowed Idaho to enforce House Bill 71, a law banning Idaho youth from receiving gender-affirming care medications and surgeries.
In an opinion issued Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court granted the state of Idaho’s request to stay the preliminary injunction, which blocked the law from taking effect. This means the preliminary injunction now only applies to the plaintiffs involved in Poe v. Labrador — a lawsuit brought on by the families of two transgender teens in Idaho who seek gender-affirming care.
Monday’s Supreme Court decision enforces the gender-affirming care ban for all other trans youth in Idaho as the lawsuit remains ongoing in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Idaho, both of whom represent the plaintiffs, said in a press release Monday that the ruling “does not touch upon the constitutionality” of HB 71. The groups called Monday’s ruling an “awful result” for trans Idaho youth and their families.
“Today’s ruling allows the state to shut down the care that thousands of families rely on while sowing further confusion and disruption,” the organizations said in the press release. “Nonetheless, today’s result only leaves us all the more determined to defeat this law in the courts entirely, making Idaho a safer state to raise every family.”
Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador in a press release said the state has a duty to protect and support all children, and that he is proud of the state’s legal stance.
“Those suffering from gender dysphoria deserve love, support and medical care rooted in biological reality,” Labrador said. “Denying the basic truth that boys and girls are biologically different hurts our kids. No one has the right to harm children, and I’m grateful that we, as the state, have the power — and duty — to protect them.”
Recap of Idaho’s HB 71, and what led to SCOTUS opinion
Monday’s Supreme Court decision traces back to when HB 71 was signed into law in April 2023.
The law makes it a felony punishable for up to 10 years for doctors to provide surgeries, puberty-blockers and hormones to trans people under the age of 18. However, gender-affirming surgeries are not and were not performed among Idaho adults or youth before the bill was signed into law, the Idaho Capital Sun previously reported.
One month after it was signed into law, the families of two trans teens sued the state in a lawsuit alleging the bill violates the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.
In late December, just days before the law was set to take effect in the new year, U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill blocked the law from taking effect under a preliminary injunction. In his decision, he said he found the families likely to succeed in their challenge.
The state of Idaho responded by appealing the district court’s preliminary injunction decision to the Ninth Circuit, to which the Ninth Circuit denied. The state of Idaho argued the court should at least enforce the ban for everyone except for the plaintiffs.
After the Ninth Circuit’s denial, the Idaho Attorney General’s Office in February sent an emergency motion to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Idaho Press reported. Monday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision agrees with the state’s request to enforce its ban on trans health care for minors, except for the two plaintiffs.
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Mia Maldonado joined the Idaho Capital Sun after working as a breaking news reporter at the Idaho Statesman covering stories related to crime, education, growth and politics. She previously interned at the Idaho Capital Sun through the Voces Internship of Idaho, an equity-driven program for young Latinos to work in Idaho news. Born and raised in Coeur d’Alene, Mia moved to the Treasure Valley for college where she graduated from the College of Idaho with a bachelor’s degree in Spanish and international political economy.
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The preceding piece was previously published by the Idaho Capital Sun and is republished with permission.
The Idaho Capital Sun is the Gem State’s newest nonprofit news organization delivering accountability journalism on state politics, health care, tax policy, the environment and more.
We’re part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
Kansas
Kansas governor vetoes ban on health care for transgender youth
Republican lawmakers have vowed to override veto
BY TIM CARPENTER | Gov. Laura Kelly flexed a veto pen to reject bills Friday prohibiting gender identity health care for transgender youth, introducing a vague crime of coercing someone to have an abortion and implementing a broader survey of women seeking abortion that was certain to trigger veto override attempts in the Republican-led House and Senate.
The decisions by the Democratic governor to use her authority to reject these health and abortion rights bills didn’t come as a surprise given her previous opposition to lawmakers intervening in personal decisions that she believed ought to remain the domain of families and physicians.
Kelly said Senate Bill 233, which would ban gender-affirming care for trans minors in Kansas, was an unwarranted attack on a small number of Kansans under 18. She said the bill was based on a politically distorted belief the Legislature knew better than parents how to raise their children.
She said it was neither a conservative nor Kansas value to block medical professionals from performing surgery or prescribing puberty blockers for their patients. She said stripping doctors of their licenses for serving health interests of patients was wrong. Under the bill, offending physicians could be face lawsuits and their professional liability insurance couldn’t be relied on to defend themselves in court.
“To be clear, this legislation tramples parental rights,” Kelly said. “The last place that I would want to be as a politician is between a parent and a child who needed medical care of any kind. And, yet, that is exactly what this legislation does.”
Senate President Ty Masterson (R-Andover) and House Speaker Dan Hawkins (R-Wichita) responded to the governor by denouncing the vetoes and pledging to seek overrides when legislators returned to the Capitol on April 26. The trans bill was passed 27-13 in the Senate and 82-39 in the House, suggesting both chambers were in striking distance of a two-thirds majority necessary to thwart the governor.
“The governor has made it clear yet again that the radical left controls her veto pen,” Masterson said. “This devotion to extremism will not stand, and we look forward to overriding her vetoes when we return in two weeks.”
Cathryn Oakley, senior director of the Human Rights Campaign, said the ban on crucial, medically necessary health care for trans youth was discriminatory, designed to spread dangerous misinformation and timed to rile up anti-LGBTQ activists.
“Every credible medical organization — representing over 1.3 million doctors in the United States — calls for age-appropriate, gender-affirming care for transgender and nonbinary people,” Oakley said. “This is why majorities of Americans oppose criminalizing or banning gender-affirming care.”
Abortion coercion
Kelly also vetoed House Bill 2436 that would create the felony crime of engaging in physical, financial or documentary coercion to compel a girl or woman to end a pregnancy despite an expressed desire to carry the fetus to term. It was approved 27-11 in the Senate and 82-37 in the House, again potentially on the cusp of achieving a veto override.
The legislation would establish sentences of one year in jail and $5,000 fine for those guilty of abortion coercion. The fine could be elevated to $10,000 if the adult applying the pressure was the fetuses’ father and the pregnant female was under 18. If the coercion was accompanied by crimes of stalking, domestic battery, kidnapping or about 20 other offenses the prison sentence could be elevated to 25 years behind bars.
Kelly said no one should be forced to undergo a medical procedure against their will. She said threatening violence against another individual was already a crime in Kansas.
“Additionally, I am concerned with the vague language in this bill and its potential to intrude upon private, often difficult, conversations between a person and their family, friends and health care providers,” the governor said. “This overly broad language risks criminalizing Kansans who are being confided in by their loved ones or simply sharing their expertise as a health care provider.”
Hawkins, the House Republican leader, said coercion was wrong regardless of the circumstances and Kelly’s veto of the bill was a step too far to the left.
“It’s a sad day for Kansas when the governor’s uncompromising support for abortion won’t even allow her to advocate for trafficking and abuse victims who are coerced into the procedure,” Hawkins said.
Emily Wales, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Plains Votes, said HB 2436 sought to equate abortion with crime, perpetuate false narratives and erode a fundamental constitutional right to bodily autonomy. The bill did nothing to protect Kansas from reproductive coercion, including forced pregnancy or tampering with birth control.
“Planned Parenthood Great Plains Votes trusts patients and stands firmly against any legislation that seeks to undermine reproductive rights or limit access to essential health care services,” Wales said.
Danielle Underwood, spokeswoman for Kansas for Life, said “Coercion Kelly” demonstrated with this veto a lack of compassion for women pushed into an abortion.
The abortion survey
The House and Senate approved a bill requiring more than a dozen questions be added to surveys of women attempting to terminate a pregnancy in Kansas. Colorful debate in the House included consideration of public health benefits of requiring interviews of men about reasons they sought a vasectomy birth control procedure or why individuals turned to health professionals for treatment of erectile dysfunction.
House Bill 2749 adopted 81-39 in the House and 27-13 in the Senate would require the Kansas Department of Health and Environment to produce twice-a-year reports on responses to the expanded abortion survey. The state of Kansas cannot require women to answer questions on the survey.
Kelly said in her veto message the bill was “invasive and unnecessary” and legislators should have taken into account rejection in August 2022 of a proposed amendment to the Kansas Constitution that would have set the stage for legislation further limiting or ending access to abortion.
“There is no valid medical reason to force a woman to disclose to the Legislature if they have been a victim of abuse, rape or incest prior to obtaining an abortion,” Kelly said. “There is also no valid reason to force a woman to disclose to the Legislature why she is seeking an abortion. I refuse to sign legislation that goes against the will of the majority of Kansans who spoke loudly on Aug. 2, 2022. Kansans don’t want politicians involved in their private medical decisions.”
Wales, of Planned Parenthood Great Plains Votes, said the bill would have compelled health care providers to “interrogate patients seeking abortion care” and to engage in violations of patient privacy while inflicting undue emotional distress.
Hawkins, the Republican House speaker, said the record numbers of Kansas abortions — the increase has been driven by bans or restrictions imposed in other states — was sufficient to warrant scrutiny of KDHE reporting on abortion. He also said the governor had no business suppressing reporting on abortion and criticized her for tapping into “irrational fears of offending the for-profit pro-abortion lobby.”
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Tim Carpenter has reported on Kansas for 35 years. He covered the Capitol for 16 years at the Topeka Capital-Journal and previously worked for the Lawrence Journal-World and United Press International.
The preceding story was previously published by the Kansas Reflector and is republished with permission.
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The Kansas Reflector is a nonprofit news operation providing in-depth reporting, diverse opinions and daily coverage of state government and politics. This public service is free to readers and other news outlets. We are part of States Newsroom: the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization, with reporting from every capital.
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Kansas governor vetoes ban on health care for transgender youth
