Arizona governor vetoes bill seeking to erase trans folks from public life

Gov. Katie Hobbs
Photo: Gage Skidmore

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) vetoed 13 Republican bills on Tuesday, including one that LGBTQ+ advocates say would have erased transgender people from legal recognition in the state.

Senate Bill 1628, the so-called “Arizona Women’s Bill of Rights,” was introduced by state Sen. Sine Kerr (R) in February. Similar to laws introduced in other states like Indiana and Iowa, it would have removed the word “gender” from state law, replacing it with the word “sex,” which it defined strictly according to biology. The proposed law defined gendered terms like “boy,” “girl,” “man,” “woman,” “mother,” and “father” according to biological sex and would have banned trans people from single-sex environments like bathrooms, locker rooms, sports teams, and domestic violence shelters that do not align with the sex they were assigned at birth.

Critics said the bill would have erased trans and nonbinary people from public life in Arizona.

“This effort to erase trans people and try to force them to fit into boxes that they don’t fit into is totally unacceptable to me,” state Sen. Eva Burch (D) told the Arizona Senate Health and Human Services Committee in February. “I’m not afraid of trans people, I’m afraid of what’s going to happen to them if we keep treating them like this.”

The American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona’s Hugo Polanco warned that S.B. 1628 would have also prevented trans people from…

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