House moves forward with bills affecting transgender health care and identity
The first, Senate Bill 1257, requires health insurance providers who cover gender transition therapy, medications and surgeries to also cover treatment to 'manage, reverse, reconstruct from, or recover from' gender transition.
'If you take somebody to the dance and they want to go home, then you have to take them home,' State Rep. Jeff Leach, R-McKinney, said. Leach authored a similar house bill, and carried State Sen. Bryan Hughes', R-Mineola, SB 1257 in the House.
'If an insurance company is paying thousands and thousands of dollars to pay for someone to transition — which they have the right to do,' Leach said. 'All this bill does is say that if you do that, you also have to provide coverage if that person wants to come home from the dance.'
Democratic House members brought up several concerns about the bill including potentially increasing insurance costs, potentially classifying mental health therapy as a gender transition and possibly creating a chilling effect so providers no longer cover transition services. They also questioned how undergoing transition surgeries differs from certain cosmetic surgeries.
'Going outside of the scope of this, if someone has a facelift, if some gets hair transplant, if someone gets a BBL — a Brazilian butt lift — if someone gets rhinoplasty surgery, anything that is cosmetic — if they get breast implants would they now be covered under this?' State Rep. Christian Manuel, D-Nederland, said. 'Am I now covered because I transitioned one part of my body?'
SB 1257 passed to a third reading with a vote of 82-37. If passed there SB 1257 would head to the Governor's desk, or back to the Senate if amended.
Afterwards, the House spent hours discussing House Bill 229, which author State Rep. Ellen Troxclair, R-Marble Falls, calls the 'Women's Bill of Rights.' HB 229 requires Texas' governmental agencies to only acknowledge two genders — male and female — and assign all Texans to one of those two genders on official state records. HB 229 also officially defines male and female based on a person's reproductive organs.
'This is the women's bill of rights. It's a simple yet critical piece of legislation that defines once and for all what a woman is,' Troxclair said.
Opponents claim many Texans fall outside the definition of male and female described in HB 229.
'Does that mean that a woman who cannot have children — because there are many — are not women?' State Rep. Jessica González, D-Dallas, said.
'The definition relates to what our biological systems are designed and organized to produce at birth,' Troxclair responded. 'They're not depended on following through on a reproductive capacity.'
González and Troxclair proceeded to debate whether the bill is intend to protect women or to attack the transgender community.
'You're essentially just putting folks in a situation where you're trying to erase them from existence,' González said. 'They're not going anywhere, no matter how much you try to erase them.'
'You are right, we have concerns that women are being erased, that girls are being erased,' Troxclair responded. '[When] we cannot fully define what a woman is, that leads to an erosion of our rights that are foundationally created to protect women and girls.'
HB 229 passed with a final vote of 86-36. Unlike SB 1257, it will still have to go through the full Senate process if it passes the House on a third reading.
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