A Missouri Senate committee will consider a bill tomorrow that seeks to ban school officials from discussing gender identity or sexual orientation — a bill that goes even further than the Florida bill it was modeled upon.
Senate Bill 134 would bar nurses, counselors, teachers and other school personnel at public or charter schools from discussing gender identity or sexual orientation with minor students. Such topics could only be broached by licensed mental health care providers with a parent or legal guardian’s permission.
Florida’s infamous “Don’t Say Gay Bill” prohibited classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity for kindergarten through grade 3. Missouri’s proposal, sponsored by Senator Mike Moon (R-Ash Grove), goes a step further: Discussions on gender identity would not be allowed for students of any age.
PROMO, a statewide advocacy organization for LGBTQ+ equality, calls Moon’s proposal “the most extreme ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill in the U.S.”
“It’s a book ban, a curriculum ban and it encourages an environment of bullying,” Shira Berkowitz, senior director of public policy and advocacy for PROMO, tells the RFT.
Berkowitz worries that the bill, if passed, would prevent teachers from incorporating books with LGBTQ+ characters and that by prohibiting school officials from talking about gender identity or sexual orientation, it would stop students from talking to school officials about bullying related to those things.
“Every single person has a gender identity or sexual orientation,” Berkowitz says. “We often need multiple role models who are school personnel, because we spend significantly more time in school than we do in our homes.”
Along with several others, PROMO will on Tuesday testify against the bill, as it’s done for several other anti-LGBTQ+ bills heard in Missouri in the past month.
So far this session, Missouri Republicans have introduced nearly 30 LGBTQ+ bills — more than any other state has seen, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. Among the wave of proposals are bills aimed at limiting transgender girls and women from participating in girls sports. Another bill seeks to make performing drag in front of children a crime, punishable by a misdemeanor charge.
On Tuesday, hardly an hour after the Education and Workforce Development Committee will hear the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill, another committee will hear a bill that would make it impossible for anyone who is transgender to change the sex marker on their birth certificate.
Current law allows birth certificates to reflect surgical sex changes. But Senate Bill 14, sponsored by Senator Mike Cierpiot (R-Lee’s Summit), would only allow birth certificates to be amended if the sex of an individual was changed for “medically-verifiable disorders of sex development,” or when a child’s genitals don’t match their chromosomes.
Asked why Missouri Republicans have sponsored such proposals, Berkowitz says, “I think the end result is to erase the presence of LGBTQ+ Missourians.”
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