The North Carolina state legislature successfully overrode a series of vetoes by Democratic Governor Roy Cooper surrounding transgender issues, allowing a ban on transgender surgeries and hormones for children to become law.
The overrides passed the North Carolina House of Representatives with seventy-three lawmakers in favor and forty-six opposed.
Under the new law, doctors are banned from performing surgical procedures like mastectomies, as well as prescribing puberty-blocking drugs or cross-sex hormones if the patient is under eighteen years old. The law contains certain exceptions to the bans for diseases unrelated to gender. Any doctor who violates the law will have their medical license revoked.
The legislation also provides a means for children who suffered under transgender procedures to receive compensation. Patients have a twenty-five-year window after they turn eighteen to file lawsuits against doctors and their employers for injuries and psychological trauma connected with the procedures.
Minors receiving hormones before August 1 are exempt from these bans, and may continue receiving them with parental consent.
In addition to a ban on transgender procedures for children, the legislature successfully overrode vetoes on a bill banning men from playing in female sports. Athletes could previously play sports based on their self-identified gender. The law now stipulates that athletes are required to play on the team matching their biological sex, “recognized based solely on the student's reproductive biology and genetics at birth.”
The final bill the legislature passed requires schools to notify parents before changing the name or pronoun used for a child at school. That bill also bans teachers from enacting lessons on gender identity, sexual activity, or sexuality from kindergarten to fourth grade.
Republicans said that the bill increases transparency in schools, gives parents security surrounding the well-being of their children, and keeps curriculum focused on core subjects instead of gender ideology.
In a statement decrying the veto overrides posted on social media, Cooper wrote that the lawmakers passed “legislation that discriminates, makes housing less safe, blocks FEMA disaster recovery funding, hurts the freedom to vote and damages our economy.”
“These are the wrong priorities, especially when they should be working nights and weekends if necessary to get a budget passed by the end of the month,” he continued.
Republicans argued that the bills were necessary to protect children and women from harmful gender ideology and that Cooper’s vetoes placed them at risk.
Republican State Senator Joyce Krawiec, who sponsored the bill banning transgender procedures for children, wrote in a column earlier this month that “these are life-altering procedures and are not reversible.”
North Carolina joins a cadre of nearly two dozen other states which have banned transgender procedures for minors, including Florida, Georgia, and Texas.
