Freshman Republican Sen. Jeff Taylor said he appreciated everyone’s passion and personal stories. He said he doesn’t believe there is any intention of being hateful, putting people at harm, hurting anyone’s dignity or anything like that.
“I think it’s a fundamental difference of perspective – what is gender, what is sex, how is that determined,” Taylor said. “Partly because of the transgender movement adopting this in recent decades, essentially how human society has understood sex and gender since the beginning of time – that has been changed. And is this bill going to undo that, something that I think has been harmful to our society? No, it’s not.
“From my perspective at least, I see no difference between sex and gender. Those are synonyms. For hundreds of years, those were synonyms. The word gender is now being redefined. But in my view gender and sex – it’s the same thing, it’s determined before your born, it’s embedded in a person’s body, in every cell of their body, it’s genetic – same word coming from Latin meaning birth – it’s baked into the process. And somebody’s perception of what they are when they’re very young does not change the reality.
“So, if we’re going to have bathrooms in our K-12 schools, and I think there is a reason that they have been divided between male and female, boy and girl, then to me, this makes some sense to have consistency. But I do understand it’s going to cause distress to people who identify a certain way correctly or incorrectly, in terms of their gender.”
