With the end of the California legislative session last month, lawmakers sent Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) a flurry of bills designed to shore up protections in the state for the LGBTQ+ community and transgender rights, as the White House’s crusade against LGBTQ+ identity presses on.

While Newsom signed nearly 100 measures into law last week, those bills were left on the table for now, according to staff. He has until the end of the week to sign or veto the legislation.

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One LGBTQ+ bill in the works since January did earn a veto from the governor, the Sacramento Bee reported.

Newsom dismissed Assembly Bill 86, a measure that would have tweaked language about health education standards for kindergarten through 8th grade.

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Republicans latched onto the legislation as an example of “gender ideology” at work in state government, with the Senate Minority Leader Brian Jones (R) demanding Newsom veto it.

The bill promotes the “theory that reproductive anatomy does not necessarily determine a person’s gender,” Jones wrote in a message to Newsom.

“For third grade students the framework states, ‘When providing instruction on sexual and reproductive organs, teachers can introduce the concept that gender does not always match the sexual and reproductive organs described,’” Jones said. “Teaching controversial gender theories to students as young as eight or nine years old is not a practice that most Californians support, nor want to see happening in our schools.”

In a signing message, Newsom kicked the can.

He was vetoing the legislation, he said, because the bill should be considered after a state study scrutinizing health curricula was completed.

Newsom has been under scrutiny by the LGBTQ+ community since March, when he invited young conservative influencer Charlie Kirk on his podcast and agreed that trans student-athletes competing with cisgender girls was “unfair.”

Kirk was slain at a college rally in Utah in September.

Newsom neither signed nor vetoed a number of bills passed by the Democratic California House and Senate addressing LGBT+ community concerns.

One bill expanded San Francisco state Sen. Scott Wiener’s “State of Refuge” law, passed in 2022. The enhanced measure would prevent other states and private entities from subpoenaing private medical records.

At least four bills directly addressed trans protections, including Wiener’s healthcare and patient confidentiality measure; streamlining legal name and gender changes, and enhanced confidentiality requirements for court records; nondiscrimination protections for health insurance plans and an insurance company mandate to offer a 12-month supply of prescription hormones; and a requirement to ensure homelessness programs remain inclusive and nondiscriminatory, combatting federal efforts to force homeless shelters to ban trans people.

Bills addressing the broader concerns of the LGBTQ+ community include insurance coverage requirements to cover all FDA-approved medications that prevent HIV, like PrEP, without prior authorization; mandates that schools and universities provide youth in the state with crisis hotline information, including LGBTQ+ hotlines after the president shutdown the “option 3” Trevor Project hotline for LGBTQ+ youth; broadening paid family leave protections to include more diverse, queer and chosen families; clarifying California adoption law to allow non-residents to adopt children born in the state under its inclusive proceedings.

Republicans rejected most of the measures but joined Democrats to pass the PrEP access bill, inclusive shelters, and the family leave protections.

GOP legislators were united in objecting to the crisis hotline bill, which was a direct response to the presidential administration cutting the program, and may reflect fears among California Republicans about publicly repudiating the president’s anti-LGBTQ+ agenda.

Editor’s Note: The original version of this story mistakenly stated Newsom has chosen not to sign trans protections. It has been updated to say he has until the end of the week to act.

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