With Crossover Week in the rearview mirror, legislators now have one month to consider any bills in committee that have crossed over between chambers so far. While we’re still dealing with a number of anti-LGBTQ+ bills, this next phase of the legislative session will bring more opportunities for public participation. If you don’t have a Request to Speak account, now is the perfect time to set one up. With an RTS account, you can register your position on legislation and sign up to give testimony in committee meetings.
This session also brings an opportunity to pass statewide non-discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ Arizonans in employment, housing and public accommodations. HB 2802, The Equality and Fairness for all Arizonans Act, ensures that LGBTQ+ Arizonans have the same opportunity to live, work, and contribute to Arizona that all other Arizonans have, and will ban conversion therapy for minors through licensing requirements for medical professionals. Use our advocacy tool to contact your legislators and encourage them to stand up for fairness over discrimination, for unity over division, and to join the work to pass the Equality and Fairness for all Arizonans bill this session.
Bills to Watch out For
LGBTQ+ advocates and allies have already won some incredible victories against anti-LGBTQ+ bills in the Arizona legislature, and we can keep that work going as we move into the next phase of the session. Contact your legislators today to encourage them to vote no on divisive and discriminatory anti-LGBTQ+ legislation.
SB 1049 | Sponsored by Senator Townsend, this bill would impose civil penalties of $5,000 against schools for violations of the parent’s bill of rights, a section of the Arizona Revised Statutes that serves as the foundation for a lot of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. The bill originally made violations of the parent's bill of rights a class 2 misdemeanor, but this was removed by a floor amendment before being sent to the House.
SB 1138 | Sponsored by Senator Petersen, this bill would have banned all gender-affirming care for trans youth, but with a strike-everything amendment from Senator Pace now conforms mostly to the WPATH standards of care (see page 21 of the linked document). The outstanding issues of this bill are that it is more restrictive of breast surgeries than WPATH and remains an unnecessary bill. Standards of care evolve and should be decided by experts, not the legislature.
SB 1165 | Sponsored by Senator Barto, this bill would ban trans girls from girls sports and diminish the quality of school athletics by imposing undue and uncomfortable scrutiny on all students.
SB 1399 | Sponsored by Senators Kerr and Barto, SB 1399 would permit discrimination in adoption and foster care services on the basis of religious preference, under the guise of protecting religious groups from discrimination. The definitions in this bill are so broad that it could allow group homes to turn away LGBTQ+ kids, who already experience disproportionate levels of family rejection and homelessness. Unlike SB 1049, SB 1138, and SB 1165, this bill has not made it out of the Senate, but could see progress as soon as Monday.
HB 2161 | Sponsored by Representative Kaiser, this bill has received four amendments over the past week, inserting and removing entire sections at a time. While an explicit requirement to out trans students has been removed, the catch-all language “any information that is relevant to the physical, emotional or mental health of the parent's child” remains in the bill, and creates the same concerns around the privacy and safety of LGBTQ+ youth.
HB 2495 | Sponsored by Representative Hoffman, this bill is ostensibly a ban on pornography in schools, but despite the amendments that have been made so far, would still ban enormous swaths of literature from school curricula, including many stories of LGBTQ+ lives and books by LGBTQ+ authors. HB 2495 has already received a committee assignment to the Senate Education committee.
