newsom signed six bills for the gays. his press release still says "add press release content here." i'm framing it.
via the Office of the Governor, Equality California, and bill histories on leginfo.
The official announcement from California's governor went up Saturday with a headline about "pushing back on attacks by the Trump administration," a bulleted list with green checkmarks, and, right after the "SACRAMENTO" dateline, its first line of actual text: "Add press release content here." As of Sunday morning, it still says that. Somebody in Sacramento is having a weekend.
The laws themselves are real, and they are good. Gavin Newsom signed a six-bill package from the Legislature's LGBTQ Caucus. His quote, from the parts of the release that did get written: "The Trump administration has launched an all-out assault on the LGBTQ community, using medical records to target U.S. servicemembers and civilians alike, hurting countless people and betraying hard-won trust. California will not stand for it." (The medical-records part is not rhetoric. We wrote about how the Pentagon did it.)
what the six bills do
Per the governor's office and Equality California, which pushed for them:
- AB 1775 (Chris Ward) connects trans veterans pushed out under the federal ban to state housing help, licensing and job support, and California's discharge-upgrade programs. It lands the same week Democrats were asking Hegseth where those veterans' separation pay went.
- AB 1930 (Rick Chavez Zbur) makes providers tell the state attorney general when they get a subpoena about gender-affirming or abortion care, and lets the AG step in.
- SB 934 (Scott Wiener) rewrites the state's conversion therapy ban after the Supreme Court's March 31 ruling in Chiles v. Salazar struck down another state's ban. It keeps protections for patients under 18 and carves out therapy that supports exploration without steering toward an outcome, Equality California says.
- SB 1023 (John Laird) makes injectable PrEP reimbursable through the pharmacy benefit, so smaller clinics do not have to front the cost of stocking it.
- SB 1114 (Christopher Cabaldon) limits when state agencies can hand out data on sexual orientation, gender identity and intersex status.
- SB 1328 (Sabrina Cervantes) extends campus LGBTQ resources to satellite campuses.
what he has not signed
Equality California sent the governor a list of nine priorities on Sept. 14, with a Sept. 30 deadline. Two of them still show no action on leginfo as of Sunday: AB 1876, which writes the Affordable Care Act's nondiscrimination rules into state law, and SB 1149, which would let workers take bereavement leave for a chosen family member. That second one is about as gay as a bill gets, so watch this week.
And the one that got away: a week ago Newsom vetoed AB 2164, the bill meant to shield California trans-care providers from out-of-state prosecution. So the scoreboard is six signed, one vetoed, two pending, and one press release that is, in fairness, the most honest document in state government.
