Two additional anti-LGBTQ+ bills were introduced by Republicans in the General Assembly on Monday.
SB 514 “Youth Health Protection Act” would prohibit transgender people under the age of 21 from receiving any trans-affirming care and penalize medical professionals who provide transition-related care. The bill additionally requires state employees, including public school teachers, counselors, and administrators, to share with students’ parents if they learn that a student may be transgender. The bill also protects the dangerous anti-LGBTQ practice of “conversion therapy.”
SB 515 “Health Care Heroes Conscience Protection Act” is an extreme bill that would allow any medical provider – defined so broadly to reach all health care entities as well as individual staff at hospitals, nursing homes, clinics, or pharmacies – to refuse to do anything they object to on the basis of conscience, including even providing information or referrals. It in effect establishes a broad and dangerous “license to discriminate” against LGBTQ people, pregnant people, or people of differing faith backgrounds.
The bill descriptive summaries used above are from NCisReady.org, a cooperative project of EqualityNC and the Campaign for Southern Equality. LGBTQ+ Democrats of NC is a cooperating organization in their efforts to pass local non-discrimination ordinances and fight anti-LGBTQ legislative efforts.
Go to https://ncisready.org/antilgbtq-bills to learn more about these harmful bills as well as the previously introduced anti-trans HB 358 and learn how you can take action to contact your legislators about these harmful and hateful bills introduced and supported by Republican members of our General Assembly.
As of time of publishing this post, both SB 514 and 515 have been referred to the Senate Committee on Rules and Operations, which is frequently where bills introduced which the leadership would prefer to never get a hearing are sent to die. (This has been the practice in the years since HB 2 with other anti-LGBTQ bills which were introduced, but the leadership didn’t have a desire to have another controversy which could lead to boycotts and other negative impacts to the state such as were the result of HB 2.) But referral to that committee is no guarantee of safety. It is important that pressure be put on the Legislature to make sure these bills are never considered.
An update on HB 358, (in the House, not the Senate) was referred to the Judiciary 1 Committee. If it receives a favorable recommendation there, it will need to make it through 2 different Education Committees and the House Rules Committee before coming to the floor. The bill is currently on the Legislative Calendar to be heard in the Judiciary 1 Committee at noon on Wednesday, April 14th, but is labeled as “Discussion Only” so there isn’t an expectation of a vote on the bill that day.
HB 358 “Save Women’s Sports Act” directly attacks transgender youth in schools who seek to participate in sports by requiring students on middle, high school, and intercollegiate sport teams to participate in a team aligned with the sex assigned at birth. HB358 seeks to use invasive and inappropriate questions about youth and their sex assigned at birth as a way to enforce outdated generalizations about male and female bodies. The Act would impact all transgender and gender non-conforming athletes, but the rhetoric around the legislation specifically targets transgender girls.
Additional note: SB 514 is similar to ones under consideration in several other states and recently passed in Arkansas over the veto of its Republican Governor who deemed it “overreaching” where their bill only included patients under 18, NC’s version goes significantly older removing health care agency for younger adults.