In a special guest column for the Heartland Post, Sen. Rob Hutton notes thaty Governor Evers’ trans vetoes are quite literally harming Wisconsin’s Children
This week, the Governor vetoed legislation that would have protected girls and women in school athletics and extended an opportunity for justice for individuals who were harmed by gender-altering medical treatments given to them as a child. In doing so, he denied protections for the same vulnerable groups he spent all last year talking about.
Two of the bills he vetoed were Assembly Bill 100, designating athletic sports, teams, and locker rooms in K-12 schools based on the sex of the participants, and preventing biological males from using locker rooms designated for females. Assembly Bill 102 applies the same policy to sports, teams, and locker rooms at public universities.
These proposals are simple and sensible—girls’ sports and locker rooms are reserved for female athletes. They address the concerns we’ve seen in recent years throughout the country, including Wisconsin.
In Sun Prairie, an 18-year-old student identifying as female exposed himself to four freshman girls in the school shower, triggering a Title IX investigation by the Biden Education Department. In Green Bay, parents reported that their daughters were coming home with welts and bruises, and some were quitting the team out of concern for their safety after a transgender student joined a female volleyball team.
Girls and women deserve fair athletic competition and secure private spaces. They should be able to compete without fear of injury or intrusion, but also free from accusations of intolerance if they speak up.
These vetoes disregard the interests of the vast majority of competitors who simply want to achieve in sports and create lifelong memories, not be part of a large-scale social experiment.
The Governor also vetoed Senate Bill 405, which allows people who experience physical, psychological or emotional harm from gender-altering treatments given to them while they were under the age of 18 to seek civil compensation from the healthcare provider. Since the full consequences of these untested treatments may not manifest well into adulthood, the bill allows the patient to sue until they are age 33.
The bill addresses growing concerns about the long-term impact of testing gender-altering medicine on children with mental health challenges. These treatments generally include off-label use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and gender-altering surgeries. What little research is available suggests serious physical and psychological unintended consequences.
Recognizing these treatments are poorly researched, and the side effects are unknown, two major medical groups recently recommended ending the science experiment on children. The American Medical Association and the American Society of Plastic Surgeons cited insufficient evidence and low-quality research about the long-term consequences of those procedures and advised no longer performing them on minors.
Medical treatment for children should be held to higher standards. When it’s not, those who were administered treatments with unknown, life-altering effects should be able to seek justice just as any other person who was harmed by a medical procedure would expect.
The Governor’s veto disregards the interests of formerly transgender individuals—a group that seems likely grow in the years to come as these teens transition into adulthood and find their lives were changed for the worse by bad medical advice given to them as children. It’s not clear to me who benefits by Governor Evers denying those folks a chance at justice.
