Educators say bills aimed at transgender students that continue to move through the Arizona Legislature are a distraction from issues such as school funding.
Senate Bill 1166, which would require schools to notify parents within five days if a teacher or contractor calls a student by a different name or pronoun, has passed the Senate and is moving through the House.
“All that this bill does is really try to drive a wedge between educators and their parents,” said Josh Atkins, a middle school teacher.
Arizona schools, he said, need more funding. Instead of working with educators to address large class sizes and building repairs, lawmakers introduce bills like SB 1166, he said.
He and other educators say they wish lawmakers would focus on issues like school funding instead.
“Senator Kavanaugh is in the majority,” Atkins said. “He could get a bill to the governor today increasing school funding or providing real mental health services for our students. And instead, he chooses to spend his time writing bills that demonize our students.”
The bill’s sponsor, Republican Sen. John Kavanaugh, dismissed such criticism.
“We’re here for almost half the year,” he said. “We deal with hundreds of bills. We can literally do more than one bill at a time.”
Kavanaugh said he introduced SB 1166 because he’s worried about students with gender dysphoria.
“This is important because if a child, their child, has a condition that requires psychiatric care, the parents need to know about this so they can get the child that care,” he said.
According to the American Psychiatric Association, gender dysphoria is a term for “psychological distress that results from an incongruence between one’s sex assigned at birth and one’s gender identity.” Not all transgender people experience gender dysphoria, which the association says is diagnosed with specific criteria and must include “clinically significant distress or impairment” in functioning.
Atkins said trans students should feel safe in public schools.
“There are so many other things that could be done to support that student instead of just outing them to their parents,” he said.
A potential veto
Another bill sponsored by Kavanaugh passed Wednesday and is on the governor’s desk. Senate Bill 1182 bans trans students from using public school shower rooms that align with their gender, requiring schools to provide them with a single-occupancy or employee shower instead.
Gov. Katie Hobbs on Tuesday vetoed a measure that would have replaced the word “gender” in all state laws with “sex.” Senate Bill 1628 also strictly defined sex as being “biological sex, either male or female, at birth,” stating that every individual was “either a male or female.”
“As I have said time and again, I will not sign legislation that attacks Arizonans,” Hobbs wrote in her veto letter.
She vetoed a pronoun bill similar to SB 1166 last year, but Kavanaugh is hopeful this one will become law.
“This simply says, ‘Tell the parents,’” he said. “I don't really think the governor wants to keep parents in the dark about medical conditions that may be harmful to their children."
But if Hobbs does veto it, Kavanaugh will try again in two years.
“I suspect there's going to be a big flip from the Democrats based on their poor performance at both the federal and state level,” he said. “And we'll get back to a Republican governor.”
Kavanaugh had also introduced legislation for a ballot measure with provisions from both his pronoun bill and shower room bill, which would have bypassed the governor and gone directly to voters. But the measure failed in the Senate in late February.
