Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers has vetoed legislation restricting the forms of medical intervention permitted during the treatment of minors who self-identify as transgender.
The legislature passed Assembly Bill 465 in October after almost every Democrat in the state senate voted against the measure and every Republican voted in its favor. AB 465 “prohibits health care providers from engaging in, causing the engagement in, or making referrals for, certain medical intervention practices upon an individual under 18 years of age 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.”
This includes prohibiting doctors from performing any surgery that could cause sterilization such as castration, vasectomy, hysterectomy, oophorectomy, metoidioplasty, orchiectomy, penectomy, phalloplasty, and vaginoplasty. The law also prohibits doctors from offering minors mastectomies as well as administering supplying or prescribing hormone therapies or drugs that delay or stop puberty.
Evers had vowed to veto the bill before it had been passed.
“I am vetoing this bill in its entirety because I object to restricting physicians from providing evidence-based and medically appropriate care to their patients, restricting parents from making decisions with physicians to ensure their kids receive the healthcare they need, and preventing patients from receiving that basic, lifesaving care,” said Evers in a press release on Dec. 6. “Healthcare providers should be trusted to provide medically appropriate and accurate information, treatment, and care for their patients without the unnecessary political interference of politicians.”
Evers said he objects “to the Legislature’s ongoing efforts to manufacture and perpetuate false, hateful, and discriminatory anti-LGBTQ policies and rhetoric in our state.”
“This type of legislation, and the rhetoric beget by pursuing it, harms LGBTQ people and kids’ mental health, emboldens anti-LGBTQ hate and violence, and threatens the safety and dignity of LGBTQ Wisconsinites,” said the governor. “I will veto any bill that makes Wisconsin a less safe, less inclusive, and less welcoming place for LGBTQ people and kids.”
The bill does include a limited number of exceptions for doctors acting in alignment with a “good faith medical decision of a parent or guardian” of a child who was “born with a medically verifiable genetic disorder of sex development” or if the child “suffers from a physical disorder, physical injury, or physical illness that would, as certified by a physician, place the minor in imminent danger of death or impairment of a major bodily function unless surgery is performed.”
Additionally, hormone therapies or other gender-related treatments are permitted if the minor has “any infection, injury, disease, or disorder that has been caused by or exacerbated by the performance of a gender transition medical procedure, whether or not that procedure was performed in accordance with state and federal law.”
Wisconsin Republicans had expected Evers’ veto and maintain the restrictions were an important step in protecting youth who experience gender dysphoria or who identify as transgender.
“While the governor’s veto of this legislation is certainly not surprising, it serves as a stark reminder of just how out of touch with reality Governor Evers is," Republican Senator Duey Stroebel said in a statement, per Fox News. “Protecting children from invasive and irreversible medical interventions is the right thing to do from both a scientific and ethical standpoint.”
