Utah Legislature OKs bill limiting access to dorms for transgender students
"I want to be very, very clear: This is a sensitive and emotional issue, but no person deserves harassment — trans or otherwise," she told her House colleagues last month.
The bill cleared its final legislative hurdle Monday morning after the Senate approved it on Thursday with minor changes. There was no discussion of the bill on the House floor, but Gricius cast some lighthearted shade toward senators in describing the recent changes.
"Our dear senators didn't know what a birth certificate was, so we added the definition for them," she said.
That definition states that an "unamended birth certificate" is "a birth certificate with no amendment history; or with no amendment history that: does not include gender-related amendments; or includes gender-related amendments that only: correct(s) an error or omission resulting from a scrivener's error ... or correct(s) a misidentification of birth sex for an intersex individual."
HB269 passed along mostly partisan lines, with one Republican voting against it in the Senate. Republicans have said the bill protects women from biological males in private spaces, while Democrats argued the issue is already addressed on an individual basis at each university and the bill needlessly singles out transgender Utahns.
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Before the event got started, he told the university police officers on hand he didn't want anyone kicked out of the town hall for exercising their First Amendment rights. Only one individual was told to leave after protesting the situation in Gaza, Flood said, and he left peacefully. 'I said, 'I don't want people kicked out or removed just for voicing an opinion, no matter how they voice it. If somebody is fighting somebody else, yes, do what you got to do,'' Flood said. 'When you look at the video, it looks pretty hardcore. People are literally screaming, flipping me off. They are jumping up and down. They are standing with their back to me,' he recounted. 'None of those folks get asked to leave. They don't. I don't even say, 'Please stop.'' Just a handful of lawmakers are choosing to hold town halls during the weekslong August recess. For many, there are few upsides. On the same night as the Flood town hall, veteran Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., had to abruptly cancel his town hall midway through after a group of protesters 'took over the stage' and disrupted the gathering, local police said. Three individuals were arrested on trespassing charges. Things were much tamer at a separate town hall hosted by freshman Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin in Michigan. At one point at his town hall, someone asked Flood: 'How are you helping the working class?' He talked about how the Trump law included no tax on tips, an expanded child tax credit and other provisions. Then he said something that infuriated many attendees: 'Today's Republican Party is comprised of the heart and soul of the working class.' 'That brought the house down. They were very upset that I said that," Flood told NBC News. "But that's the reality. ... Every day Americans recognize that something's changed in our country, where, as a Republican, we have won the hearts and minds of the working class. And that was very hard for the crowd to accept. But I think, to an objective person, if we haven't won their hearts and minds, we're darn close to it.'
