Tennessee governor will sign bills restricting drag, transgender youth
treatment
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[March 01, 2023]
By Jonathan Allen
(Reuters) - Tennessee Governor Bill Lee said he would sign into law
bills that passed the legislature last week banning gender-affirming
treatment for transgender youth and restricting drag performances in
public.
Speaking to reporters outside a school on Monday, Lee, a Republican,
also addressed a high-school yearbook photograph that appeared to show
him wearing a cheerleaders' dress, a wig and a pearl necklace.
"What a ridiculous, ridiculous question," Lee said when asked if he
recalled dressing in drag in 1977, "conflating something like that to
sexualized entertainment in front of children, which is a very, very
serious subject."
Lee said the drag bill, which comes into effect April 1, would protect
children from being "potentially exposed to sexualized entertainment, to
obscenity."
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Civil rights groups and drag performers have noted that Tennessee, like
other states, already bans obscenity in front of minors, and call the
restrictions unconstitutional, vague and redundant.
Modern drag performances, which have long flourished in LGBT venues
before becoming a more mainstream entertainment in recent years,
typically do not involve nudity.
Performers who host drag brunches at restaurants or library reading
hours with children say they are able to tailor their shows to be child-
or family-friendly. Representative Chris Todd, a Republican sponsor of
the bill, has said even drag shows that bill themselves as
family-friendly are inappropriate or even harmful to children.
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One of the bills Lee will sign bans doctors from providing
gender-affirming medical treatment, such as puberty blockers,
hormone therapy and surgery, for transgender minors.
The other criminalizes "adult cabaret entertainment" in public or
where it could be seen by children. The bill defines such
entertainment as including "adult-oriented" performances by
strippers, go-go dancers or "male or female impersonators," terms
left undefined.
The Tennessee bills are part of an upswing in recent months in
Republican efforts to regulate the conduct of lesbian, gay,
bisexual, transgender and queer people.
"The ultimate goal is the public erasure of LGBTQ people," said
Stella Yarbrough, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties
Union of Tennessee.
She called Lee's comments about the yearbook photograph
hypocritical: "They have this blind spot where they seem to allow
themselves to do those same activities because they assign
themselves an innocent intent, and they ascribe to others a guilty
intent or a sexually perverted intent, and it's just a double
standard."
After Lee's remarks, his office issued a statement: "The bill
specifically protects children from obscene, sexualized
entertainment, and any attempt to conflate this serious issue with
lighthearted school traditions is dishonest and disrespectful to
Tennessee families."
(Reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York; Editing by Alistair Bell)
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