The bill would mean an increase in the GOP’s efforts to introduce counter-transgender measures in state houses across the country. This was strongly opposed by medical experts and advocates of LGBTQ, who warned that it would interrupt with the necessary care.
However, the Republican legislature Arkansas’s legislature can still dominate its veto by a majority vote in both chambers – a step Hutchinson said he expects lawmakers to take.
If lawmakers dominate Hutchinson’s veto, Arkansas doctors can get discipline from the state licensing board because they provide transgender teens with hormone treatment or surgery or surgery or referrals to care.
A similar measure that lawmakers in Alabama could take would make it an offense for doctors this week to provide such care to minors, who are punishable by up to ten years in prison. The Alabama Senate has already approved the bill 23-4 along party lines.
Hutchinson, meanwhile, recently signed two bills similar to anti-transgender efforts in other states. These include bills banning transgender girls from playing competitive sports that match their gender identity, and another that allows doctors to refuse patients on moral or religious grounds – an attempt that LGBTQ advocates have considered limiting the care of transgender patients.
However, the measure that Hutchinson vetoed on Monday, he said, “interfered with the state in a parent, child, a doctor-patient relationship.”
Hutchinson said he has not received any pressure from companies to veto the measure since the legislature passed it a week ago, but said he would not be surprised if the state gets a setback – especially in light of of the response to Georgia’s electoral legislation.