Kansas's SB 12 Bill
By: Ava Piliang
On January 9, 2023, SB12 was introduced to the Kansas State legislature. Kansas SB12 is an anti-trans healthcare bill out of Kansas aimed at blocking trans people from life-changing gender-affirming surgeries. The latest update on this bill is that the legislation has advanced and is waiting to be presented to the Committee on Public Health and Welfare. There have been a number of other bills similar to SB12 across several other US states including Tennessee, Texas, Kentucky, and several others states. These bills are extremely dangerous for a few reasons. First, the bills would allow for bills criminalizing doctors for providing gender-affirming care to trans youth. The bills would also impact the entire country as they would limit the amount of coverage that insurance companies could provide. As a result, the price of gender-affirming care drastically increases, in turn making any type of medical gender-affirming care infinitely harder to receive. Gender affirming care is extremely important and bills that prevent gender-affirming care are detrimental to the LGBTQ+ community.
Sources:
http://kslegislature.org/li/b2023_24/measures/SB12/
https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/bans-trans-youth-health-care/
https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/record/23RS/hb120.html
https://www.aclu.org/legislative-attacks-on-lgbtq-rights?state=&impact=health