Four House Republicans broke with the rest of the GOP conference and voted against a bill to criminalize providing gender-affirming care to transgender youth.
While the bill still passed the lower chamber on Wednesday, with three Democrats voting in support of it, sources told NOTUS that Rep. Sarah McBride, the first openly transgender member of Congress and a member of the Democratic whip team, spoke with some of the Republicans who voted ‘no.’
One of the sources said that while McBride’s conversations were brief, some of the Republicans had expressed openness to opposing the legislation. Even so, Democrats were taken by surprise when the four Republicans — Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick, Mike Lawler, Mike Kennedy and Gabe Evans — joined the majority of their caucus in opposition to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “Protect Children’s Innocence Act.”
Rep. Becca Balint, an Equality Caucus co-chair along with McBride, confirmed to NOTUS that the conversations happened, though she said she was not sure which specific lawmakers McBride spoke with.
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“Sarah McBride takes her work very seriously, she will talk to anyone,” Balint said.
Balint explained that over the last week, there was a “core group” of House Democrats, including Equality Caucus members and House Democratic Whip Katherine Clark’s team, “who were looking at names, we were figuring out who had relationships with whom, and then each of us had separate conversations and then we would huddle back up and share information.”
“We’re most interested in the caucus, right? But we also suspected we might lose some Democrats, which is why Sarah was like, ‘Look, I’ll pick up votes wherever I can,’” Balint continued. (Democratic Reps. Henry Cuellar, Vicente Gonzalez and Don Davis voted “yes” on the bill along with most Republicans.)
McBride has emerged as a key, if quiet voice over the past year in leading Democrats, both in the House and Senate, against anti-trans legislation and in strategizing messaging.
The Delaware congresswoman told reporters Wednesday ahead of the vote that “the Equality Caucus, as well as House leadership, has consistently had conversations with our colleagues across the Democratic caucus every single time an anti-trans bill comes forward.”
“I can’t predict votes. People are going to have to make their own individual decisions, but what is clear is that the bill that is on the floor today is the most extreme anti-LGBTQ bill that has likely ever come before a Congress,” McBride said.
“If I had come out four or five years before I did, if I had had the courage to come out a little bit earlier, my parents would have done the exact same thing that they did when I came out to them at 21: They would have gone and talked, first, to their pastor and, second, to a health care professional,” McBride continued. “They would have supported me, which means that this bill would have imprisoned my parents if I had come out just a little bit earlier.”
Clark whipped against Greene’s legislation, calling it “extreme” and arguing that “this sweeping broadside criminalizes doctors and nurses for providing evidence-based, age-appropriate health care,” according to the whip notice sent to congressional offices, which was viewed by NOTUS.
“House Republicans are explicitly trying to coerce medical professionals into giving specific advice by threatening them with fines and jail time,” the whip notice said.
Fitzpatrick told NOTUS that Greene’s bill “went too far.” He pointed to how federal law already makes performing “female gender mutilation” on a minor a crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
“On this topic, I think both parties are going way too far to the extremes, and I think there needs to be understanding and compassion and, you know, not feeding into the bullying of these kids,” Fitzpatrick said.
He added that he was concerned about “the precedent this sets about parental decision-making.”
“The same theory could be used to say that if parents don’t vaccinate their kids, that they could be committing a crime, right? So the parent-child relationship, doctor-physician relationship, we have to always presume that these are sacred,” Fitzpatrick continued.
Lawler and Kennedy echoed those concerns. (Evans’ and Greene’s offices did not respond to NOTUS’ requests for comment.)
“I voted no because this bill is unconstitutional and a clear overreach of federal authority. Criminalizing parents and doctors is a dangerous slippery slope that puts Washington in the middle of deeply personal medical decisions,” Lawler said in a statement to NOTUS.
Kennedy said in a statement that while he opposes gender-affirming-care access for minors, he voted against the legislation because “it expands federal powers in a way that will invite constitutional challenges and leave loopholes that will be exploited.”
The day after the House passed Greene’s legislation, Republicans — joined by Cuellar, Davis, Gonzalez and Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez — also passed Rep. Dan Crenshaw’s “Do No Harm in Medicaid Act,” which would ban Medicaid funds from being used to cover gender-affirming care for minors. Crenshaw had tried to add this provision to President Donald Trump’s budget bill, but it was ultimately removed from the text on procedural grounds.
Fitzpatrick, Lawler, Kennedy and Evans all voted in favor of Crenshaw’s bill.
“That’s taxpayer dollars,” Fitzpatrick said. “You can believe in the legality of something and personal decisions and whatnot, federal funding is a sort of separate analysis.”
Both Greene’s and Crenshaw’s bills are not expected to become law. However, on Thursday morning, the Trump administration proposed two rules to ban Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program reimbursements for trans care for youth, and block all Medicaid and Medicare funding to hospitals that provide gender-affirming care for minors.
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