TOPEKA, Kan. — Kansas Republicans sent a strict ban on specific health care for transgender minors to Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly, setting up for another veto-override fight over the lives and rights of LGBTQ Kansans.

The Kansas House and Senate voted Wednesday to approve a bill banning hormone therapy and gender transition surgery, often called gender-affirming care, for anyone under 18.

Kelly has promised to veto the bill when it lands on her desk. She and other Democrats have joined LGBTQ activists in steep opposition to the policy, which they say needlessly blocks access to lifesaving care for vulnerable youth.

“Talk about how stressful it is to be a trans kid,” Kelly told reporters earlier this month. “To be a kid who is going through that and then add on top of that the adults in the room, who are supposed to care about you, turning on you.”

Both chambers, however, may have the two-thirds majority needed to override Kelly. The Senate approved the bill with a veto-proof majority, while the House approved the bill 82 to 29, two votes short of a veto-proof majority. Two Republicans who previously voted yes on the bill were absent.

Last year, Senate Republicans failed to override Kelly’s veto on a similar bill, but the chamber appears to have enough votes after Sen. Brenda Dietrich, a Topeka Republican, changed her vote to yes because of language in the bill allowing minors to taper off their medication.

The bill is the latest in a string of policies in Kansas and red states across the country targeting the lives of transgender youth. Twenty-two states have restricted gender-affirming care for youth, according to the Human Rights Campaign. Last year, lawmakers overrode Kelly on legislation barring transgender athletes from girls' and women's sports and legally defining man and woman by sex assigned at birth.

“There are waves of fear going across this country about how their children are going to turn out if we continue to allow a small minute percentage of children to be affirmed,” Rep. Heather Meyer, an Overland Park Democrat and mother to a transgender child, said in debate in the House, arguing supporters of the bill hadn’t taken the time to understand the people they were impacting.

“So many families are terrified, and they are going to become refugees from this state.”

Major medical associations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, have said gender-affirming care should be available to minors as “developmentally appropriate.”

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