Sixty-seven incarcerated people are currently on the gender affirming cross-sex hormones that Senate Bill 2 seeks to ban, according to sponsor GOP Sen. Mike Wilson of Bowling Green.
The measure would also ban any gender reassignment surgery, although Wilson told the committee Wednesday he had no reason to believe such surgeries have taken place.
Wilson told the committee, which passed his measure on party lines, that not everything doctors and medical associations deem medically necessary should be considered as such under his version of “common sense.”
“There are people that have made a determination that smoking was good for you, and they thought it was medically necessary, but come to find out, it was not,” Wilson said. “So a lot of times, things that are determined by the medical association or a psychiatric association are not really medically necessary.”
Wilson’s bill would classify gender-affirming hormone therapies as a “cosmetic service or elective procedure.” Other GOP members of the committee compared such treatments to face lifts and breast enhancement surgeries.
Eric Russ, executive director of the Kentucky Psychological Association, spoke in opposition to the bill. He said decades of research support the effectiveness of gender affirming care and that major medical associations deem hormone replacement therapy as a medically necessary treatment for gender dysphoria.
“The professional and scientific consensus on this is clear,” Russ said. “Specifically, bans such as the one presented here pose a direct threat to the mental health and emotional well being of transgender individuals.”
GOP Rep. Jason Nemes from Middletown said, emphatically, that a “no” vote on this legislation meant that lawmakers wanted taxpayers to pay for “these transgender surgeries.”
“That's the bottom line. No way around it. You want me to read it black and white?” Nemes said.
But multiple Democratic lawmakers who voted against the measure in committee said their main issue with the legislation was the ban on gender-affirming hormone replacement therapies.
Chris Hartman with the Fairness Campaign said the bill is targeting a “miniscule number” of Kentucky prisoners — 67 people on gender-affirming hormones constitutes roughly half a percentage point of 12,842 state inmates.
The cost of hormone-replacement therapy, Hartman argued, would be less than the cost of suicide watch and increased mental health care.
“You're not saving anything here,” Hartman said. “You're playing politics with one of the smallest and most vulnerable populations in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. It's a shame.”
One section of SB 2 states that if an inmate is already undergoing elective hormone therapy and their doctor determines that immediately terminating its use would cause physical harm, “the health care provider may institute a period during which the inmate’s use of the drug or hormone is systematically reduced and eliminated.” The bill does not determine a specific time frame.
Rep. Kimberly Moser, a Republican from Taylor Mill, sponsored legislation to a similar effect as SB 2, although her House Bill 5 included a number of additional provisions requiring sex-segregation based on gender assigned at birth. Her bill also would have not required people already undergoing hormone therapy upon admission to the correctional facility to stop if a doctor determined it would cause “physical harm” to do so.
SB 2 would still require the eventual discontinuation of the treatment. Moser voted in favor of the legislation.
The Justice and Public Safety Cabinet has come under fire from Republican lawmakers after the department submitted — and then withdrew — a proposed regulation from December they said would create a pathway for gender reassignment surgeries in the state’s prisons. The Department of Corrections said its proposed regulations had to align with federal standards of care for transgender inmates.
One transgender woman who testified at the Wednesday hearing has intimate knowledge of the effects of the legislation. Hannah Callahan was incarcerated in an Indiana jail in 2023 for a felony offense. She said that while she was imprisoned, she was denied the hormone therapy that she had been taking for years, as prescribed by her doctor. She described the weeks she spent without hormone therapy as an “absolute nightmare.”
“Suddenly, both my body and my mind began to change. Physically, I had a rapid decrease in body fat and other physical side effects that triggered extreme body dysmorphia and mental anguish,” Callahan told the committee.
She says she contemplated and ultimately attempted suicide while incarcerated. The punishment of being denied her prescribed medication, she said, “was a far worse punishment than the one I received from the county judge.”
Callahan told Kentucky Public Radio she has taken full accountability for the mistakes she made that brought her to jail, but being denied care set back her rehabilitation and could have turned into a death sentence.
Democratic Rep. Lindsey Burke from Lexington said she believed the cost of denying the relatively inexpensive hormone treatments would not outweigh the savings, especially since there is no proof of gender-affirming surgeries occurring in Kentucky prisons.
“If there was any proof or any belief that surgeries were actually happening, we could deal with that, but they're not,” Burke said. “What we're doing is grandstanding on the back of vulnerable people. And I'm not for it, and I won't be for it.”
Kentucky Public Radio’s Joe Sonka contributed to this report.
State government and politics reporting is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
