15-03-2025
KY Republicans pass eleventh-hour bills blocking some adults access to trans health care
With the clock ticking, House Republicans gave final passage to a bill that would ban Kentucky's Medicaid program from funding gender-affirming care for transgender Kentuckians and protect the controversial practice of conversion therapy.
House Bill 495 was called for a House vote in the waning hours of Friday evening and passed 67-19 at roughly 11 p.m.
Immediately after, Republicans passed Senate Bill 2 to prohibit transgender people incarcerated in Kentucky from accessing gender-affirming health care. There were 67 trans inmates in Kentucky's jails and prisons an attorney for the Justice and Public Safety Cabinet told lawmakers in January — a population that accounted for less than 1% of the total incarcerated population in Kentucky.
Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear has signaled disapproval of both bills. Even if he vetoes, because the legislature passed them before midnight, both chambers have time to override a veto when they reconvene later this month.
Though few spoke in support of the measure as the clock neared midnight, Rep. Josh Calloway, R-Irvington, told the Herald-Leader that he thought the bill passed because Kentuckians don't want public funds to go towards gender-affirming care.
'I don't think the taxpayer should be on the hook for gender transition surgeries or treatment of any sort,' Calloway said. 'That's not the taxpayers role to have to play into that delusion.'
Gender dysphoria, the clinical name for being transgender, is when a person experiences conflict between the sex they were assigned at birth and the gender they most emotionally and intellectually identify with.
Major medical associations, including the American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association, say this type of care is 'medically necessary' and have warned that increasing barriers for trans people to access that type of care is harmful.
Both bills were met with stark pushback from Democrats, who spoke at length against them on the House floor, less than an hour before the bill passage deadline ahead of the veto period.
'You run on small government (and) individual liberty,' Rep. Adam Moore, D-Lexington, said. 'Nothing's trampling on that more than saying you can't have your medication that was prescribed to you by your doctor.'
'We do not need to be spending time at 11 p.m. on the last day of concurrence debating a bill that only hurts Kentuckians,' said Louisville Democratic Rep. Nima Kulkarni. 'It doesn't do anything to save money. It does not do anything to help providers. It creates liability.'
Kulkarni added that 'bad policy is made from uninformed opinions and feelings.'
'We're ignoring data, we're ignoring science, we're ignoring medical professionals, and that is going to hurt Kentuckians,' she said.
The question of whether or not the state's Medicaid program even currently covers aspects of gender-affirming care like hormone therapy medication was a live one during the floor debate.
When House Bill 495's initial sponsor, Rep. David Hale, R-Wellington, was asked whether Medicaid currently covered access to hormone therapy for trans individuals, Hale said, 'I do not think it does.'
But Beshear, who is in charge of the state's Medicaid program, offered offered a different perspective the day before.
'In Medicaid, we allow medical experts to determine what is medically necessary. We don't determine someone's health care based on the politics of the day,' Beshear said in a press conference Thursday.
Conversion therapy is a widely discredited form of counseling that attempts to change a person's sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression. Beshear's order being targeted in the bill, House Bill 495, banned the use of tax dollars to pay for the practice but was not outright ban the practice in the state.
Fairness Campaign Executive Director Chris Hartman decried the passage of the bill to protect conversion therapy and outlaw the use of Medicaid for gender-affirming care as 'one of the most shameful bills in Kentucky history.'
'I must ask why, with a super majority in both chambers, the General Assembly felt they needed to sneak into HB 495 — a ban on transgender Medicaid coverage in one of the last committee meetings of the session — and wait until almost midnight on the final day of concurrence to call the bill and prematurely end debate,' Hartman said.
'They have opened the door to 'conversion torture' by licensed therapists and denied medically necessary healthcare to thousands of Kentuckians under the cloak of darkness.'
In a plea for Republicans to re-think supporting the bill to protect conversion therapy and end Medicaid-funded gender-affirming care for adults in Kentucky, Louisville Democratic Rep Lisa Willner tried to appeal to their empathy.
'I understand that maybe some of you don't know any trans people, maybe you think it's wrong, maybe you think that it's against your beliefs,' she said. 'But please understand that these folks we're talking about, who we may be right now about to deliver a death sentence to, they're somebody's child, they're somebody's siblings, they're someone's parents, perhaps they're friends, they're part of communities, they're our neighbors.
'Please, folks, please, let's show some mercy.'
Lexington Councilwoman Emma Curtis said late Friday night, 'as a trans Kentuckian whose life was saved by gender-affirming care that I could not have accessed without Medicaid, my heart breaks for the thousands of trans Kentuckians who won't be afforded that same basic right and whose lives and well-being are now at risk.'
The Kentucky Family Foundation, a conservative Christian lobbying group that championed both bills, celebrated their passage calling it a 'positive development.'
'To use taxpayer funds for such purposes is not only poor stewardship but encourages individuals to undergo irreparable harm to their person,' Family Foundation Executive Director David Walls said. 'It's not possible to change a person's sex, and government has no place in promoting or subsidizing such madness.'
