by Ross Williams and Jill Nolin, Georgia Recorder
April 2, 2025

With only a few more days left to pass legislation, the state Legislature advanced two controversial Senate bills that would add new restrictions to gender affirming care.

State health plan ban gets inmate addition

Vidalia Republican Sen. Blake Tillery’s Senate Bill 39 passed through a House committee on a party line vote with a new amendment.

The original version of the bill, which had already passed the committee, barred transgender state employees or their dependents from receiving care on the state health insurance plan. The version that passed the House Health Committee Tuesday also specifically prohibits people in state correctional institutions from getting gender care.

There are currently about five people who are incarcerated in Georgia who receive this care, according to Cataula Republican Sen. Randy Robertson.

Norcross Democratic Rep. Marvin Lim argued that removing transgender health care from the plan would violate the law.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported in February that discrimination lawsuits and other complaints involving transgender people had cost taxpayers at least $4.1 million since 2015, including $2.1 million to settle claims and another $2 million in legal costs. Those numbers include $365,000 paid out in a 2023 settlement in which the state agreed to provide coverage for gender-affirming care and not to restrict it again.

“We feel very strongly that it would be an unconstitutional impairment of contracts to undo those settlements, let alone just an unconstitutional move to say that this wouldn’t violate Title VII, that this wouldn’t violate the equal protection clause,” he said.

Lim was referring to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employers from discriminating based on an employee’s sex, which includes whether they are transgender, and the equal protection clause in the 14th Amendment.

Dawsonville Republican Rep. Brent Cox, who is sponsoring the bill in the Senate, indicated that the law will be a message to the state judicial branch that the Legislature wants it to be legal to ban transgender health care.

“My belief is that it clears up for the judicial branch to be able to work within these guidelines on how they’re going to rule and move forward,” he said.

Lim said he was not convinced.

“It is not enough for us to say this is our policy,” he said. “This is a violation of the U.S. Constitution and federal statutory law on anti-discrimination. So we can pass whatever law we want at the state level and say ‘the attorney general can’t do this, the Department of Community Health can’t do this.’ But the argument has always been that this is violating higher law, the federal law, and specifically the U.S. Constitution.”

Democrats on the committee also argued the language in the bill could eliminate mental health treatments for transgender people, which Cox said was a misinterpretation.

The bill will need to pass through both chambers before Friday’s final deadline if it is to become law.

Standalone ban on jail treatment

Around the same time the House Health Committee passed SB 39, the House Public and Community Health took up Robertson’s Senate Bill 185, which also bans gender-affirming care for inmates but does not affect state employees.

Robertson’s bill passed out of the committee with a voice vote, teeing it for a potential final vote by the Legislature’s April 4 adjournment. Speaking to a reporter in the hallway after the committee approved his bill, Robertson said he hadn’t had time to see the latest revision on SB 39, but he supports Tillery’s state health plan ban and would likely be happy if either bill passed.

Republican supporters make the case that taxpayer money should not go toward gender-affirming care in state prisons.

“I understand individuals get upset when I say this, but I do mean it with all compassion: elective surgeries cannot be a part of our cost in the Georgia Department of Corrections,” Robertson said.

Opponents of the bill counter that gender-affirming care encompasses more than surgeries, is far from elective and can be necessary for a person’s wellbeing. Several speakers, including two attorneys with civil rights organizations, argued Tuesday that the measure is unconstitutional.

“If adopted, Senate Bill 185 would impose blanket bans on the provision of gender-affirming care to incarcerated people with gender dysphoria, regardless of needs,” said Emily C. R. Early with the Center for Constitutional Rights. “These blanket bans have repeatedly been found unconstitutional because they show deliberate indifference to the needs of incarcerated people.”

“This Senate bill puts lives at risk, and in so doing, would bring constitutional challenges,” she added.

Robertson was dismissive of those potential challenges to the state.

“We have the five individuals who are seeking the care, and then we have the lawsuits, and if you look at that, one of the failures within our system right now is the fact we do not have a policy against it,” Robertson said.

Tuesday’s debate also veered into discussion about the origin of the slate of bills targeting transgender Georgians this year. There are at least five bills gaining traction, and lawmakers have spent hours deliberating on them and hearing public input on them, and they are spending the final days of the session trying to finalize them.

Rep. Michelle Au, a Johns Creek Democrat, said House Republican colleagues have told her that she should support Robertson’s bill because the issue of inmates receiving gender-affirming care is why former Vice President Kamala Harris lost the presidential election last year.

A leading Senate Democrat representing an Atlanta district caused an uproar last month when she joined three other Democrats who voted for Robertson’s bill.

“That comment has been made to me several times, and I just have to put on the record that I really resent a subset of our patient population being used in this way for clearly political reasons, and I really wish that you would not put your voice behind this bill,” Au said to Robertson.

Robertson said politics wasn’t the motivation for him. But Rep. Scott Hilton, a Peachtree Corners Republican, acknowledged the influence of the 2024 election.

“Politics does inform policy as much as that politics reflect what our communities want,” Hilton said. “And I think if anything this last cycle, we learned that this was an 80/20 issue, not just in Georgia, but frankly America, and that folks were flabbergasted to learn that a small segment of our population opposed policies like this.”

But Bentley Hudgins, state director with the Human Rights Campaign, argued that exit polling showed that transgender issues ranked low on the list of voter priorities.

“We have seen time and time again in history where powerful people have used public opinion to excuse crimes against humanity,” Hudgins said.

“I do want to challenge that notion that just because, even if it were true that the majority of people think that this is a popular issue, it doesn’t give you the right to pass it.”

Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor John McCosh for questions: info@georgiarecorder.com.

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