Republican lawmakers in West Virginia’s state legislature have passed a terrifying bill allowing health care providers to examine children’s genitals to identify their “biological sex” without parental consent.
The bill seeks to confine gender within a binary, defining “sex” based on whether a person produces eggs or sperm, and demanding that gender-segregated spaces such as restrooms and locker rooms be used based on an individual’s sex assigned at birth.
The bill would also require transgender students to face examinations at school. The West Virginia House of Delegates approved an amendment from Delegate J.B. Akers to officially allow childrens’ health care providers to examine a child’s genital without consent from a guardian.
Disturbingly, the bill was a step up from a previous version which would have permitted teachers themselves to perform the genital examinations without parental consent. The new version clarifies that only health care providers would be able to do so. The amendment was drafted after Delegate Kayla Young proposed her own amendment to ban child and adult genital examinations completely.
“It’s unconscionable that Republicans would support legislation that authorizes intrusive visual inspections of minors without parental approval,” she said. “West Virginians should be alarmed and disgusted by this invasion of privacy.”
Nonetheless, the bill passed in the state Senate by a 32-1 vote earlier this month with only Sen. Joey Garcia (D) voting against it. It was then passed by the House of Delegates with an 87-9 vote. The bill continues on to be signed by Gov. Patrick Morrisey (R ) before being implemented.
In response, ACLU West Virginia released a statement: “It is deeply troubling the extent to which our legislators are obsessed with other people’s genitals. While our infrastructure fails, our schools sit at the bottom of national rankings, and tens of thousands of West Virginians wonder if they will ever have access to clean drinking water, lawmakers are instead focused on making life worse for trans people in our state.”
The ACLU maintains that the legislature’s efforts to erase trans people will ultimately fail. “Trans people have always existed and there will never be a world in which they do not exist.”
