Photo courtesy of WV Legislative Photography Del. Kathie Hess Crouse urged support for her bill creating what she believes to be a Women’s Bill of Rights.

CHARLESTON — A bill meant to protect girls and women from the transgender community passed the West Virginia House of Delegates on Valentine’s Day, the irony of which was not lost on the Democratic minority in the House, who called the bill an insult to women.

House Bill 5243, creating the Women’s Bill of Rights Act, passed the House in a 87-12 vote Wednesday afternoon, with the bill now heading to the state Senate.

The only Republican nay vote against the bill came from Del. Diana Winzenreid, R-Ohio. She explained she voted against the bill because it could affect Wheeling ordinances dealing with human rights and Wheeling City Council member and Democratic candidate for mayor Rosemary Ketchum, the first transgender woman elected to public office in the state.

“My actions were not as a partisan member of this body but as a citizen and a representative of Wheeling,” Winzenreid said. “The City of Wheeling has enacted a Human Rights Commission which in its code provides residents and workers equal opportunity for employment, equal access to places of accommodation, and equal opportunity for housing.

“These rights are bestowed to all persons regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity,” Winzenreid continued. “Because an affirmative vote would restrict the rights of an official elected by the residents of Wheeling, I was unable to support the bill.”

The bill was up for passage Monday, but the House Rules Committee — made up of the leaders of the House’s major committees and the leadership of the House Democratic caucus – placed the bill on the House’s inactive calendar where it sat until the Rules Committee moved the bill back to the active calendar prior to Wednesday’s floor session.

HB 5243 — which was rolled out to great fanfare by Gov. Jim Justice and other lawmakers at the end of January — would create a “Women’s Bill of Rights” by defining sex-based terms in State Code for “woman,” “girl” and “mother” to refer to biological females except in cases of developmental and genetic anomalies or accidents.

The bill requires a person’s biological sex be set at birth, and changes references to “gender” to “sex.” It prohibits use of the term “gender identity,” and other subjective terms. It would change the definition of equal, stating that it does not mean “same” or “identical” when it comes to equality of the sexes.

HB 5243 prohibits the unfair treatment of males and females and allows the provision of separate single-sex living facilities, locker rooms, bathrooms, domestic violence shelters and rape crisis centers based on biological sex. The bill was also amended Friday to remove unwanted sexual contact from spouses as an exception to sexual offenses, also known as the marital rape exception.

Del. Kathie Hess Crouse, R-Putnam, is the lead sponsor of HB 5243. Quoting from the Bible, Hess read from the book of Genesis about the creation of mankind in God’s own image and the creation of man and woman.

“Every day Americans know a woman is an adult female. I know this, you know this, and your constituents know this,” Crouse said. “Every day Americans also understand intuitively that laws that prohibit sex discrimination are intended to stop employers and schools from treating women or men unfairly because of an immutable characteristic — sex.”

Crouse said the bill will provide guidance for state courts when it comes to situations where men who identify as women attempt to access private spaces for girls and women. Hess said LGBTQ rights groups are working to convince judges to abandon definitions in state and federal laws for women and girls.

“By convincing judges and bureaucrats to adopt their nonsensical definitions for sex-based words, they have succeeded in re-writing anti-discrimination law without your consent. That is without having to convince the people and their duly elected representatives that change is needed. Thankfully, we don’t stand for sex discrimination in West Virginia.”

All 11 members of the House Democratic caucus spoke against the bill Wednesday after more than an hour of debate. House Minority Leader Pro Tempore Kayla Young, D-Kanawha, attempted to offer an amendment to the bill last week to strip the language in the bill and replace it with a real women’s bill of rights, including access to tax-free menstrual products and free menstrual products in schools and prisons, salary transparency, expanded maternity leave, and more.

“This bill decimates the definition of ‘equal’ in our Human Rights Act,” Young said. “This law does not help women in any capacity at all. In fact, it says men and women can have single-sex environments. It provides the same thing for men as it does for women. It doesn’t do anything for women, and if you care about women you should care about all of them.

“I cannot believe we’re doing this,” Young continued. “I cannot believe we’re doing it on Valentine’s Day when we all care about love and women. Yay! But we don’t here in this Legislature.”

“This is, frankly, quite possibly the most disingenuous piece of legislation I’ve seen, and I’ve been here a few years now,” said House Minority Whip Shawn Fluharty, D-Ohio. “Women are not political pawns, but that’s what we’re doing today on Valentine’s Day.”

The only other Republican member to speak in favor of the bill was Del. J.B. Akers, R-Kanawha. Akers said multiple sections of State Code already denote differences between the sexes.

“This bill is meant to solve a specific issue that now exists in our society that has never existed before,” Akers said. “There are actually women who are displaced or vulnerable in spaces that were made for them. That’s a fact … There is a disparity of power between the sex, not that they are not equal under the law but that men and women are not identical, which is a truth we all know.”