Transgender people under the age of 18 face laws in 25 states that bar them from receiving gender-affirming medical care. Until just a few years ago, no states had such laws.
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case challenging Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for young people in its next session.
“There was growing pressure for the Supreme Court to make a decision here.” Lindsay DawsonDirector of LGBTQ Health Policy at the Health Research Institute KFF.
Dawson noted that most state bans have been challenged in court, with 20 states currently having bans in place. “There have been mixed decisions in the appeals courts, but this is always an indication that the issue could end up at the Supreme Court.”
of Details of state bans varyHowever, the law generally prohibits transgender minors from taking puberty-suppressing drugs, hormones, or undergoing surgery (although this is extremely rare for minors).
be on the agenda
Oral arguments in the Supreme Court case are scheduled to take place in the fall. US Attorney General Elizabeth Preloger will argue on behalf of transgender Tennesseans at the Supreme Court. Tennessee’s Republican Attorney General Jonathan Scurmetti will defend the law.
Bans on gender-affirming care across the country have “caused serious anxiety for transgender young people and their families across the country, and are particularly damaging in Tennessee and other states where the laws are in place.” Read the pre-logger request Order a judge to hear the case.
Scrummetti wrote in the statement“We fought hard to defend Tennessee’s law that protects children from irreversible gender-based labeling, and I look forward to ending this fight at the U.S. Supreme Court. This case will bring much-needed clarity about whether the Constitution includes special protections for gender identity.”
What was the catalyst for these new laws restricting gender-affirming care? “You can’t point to any specific external event,” Dawson says. “But these policies spread like wildfire. Once a handful of states enacted them, other states followed suit.”
Conservative groups including the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Heritage Foundation have urged state lawmakers to take up the issue. “Experimental sex-reassignment surgeries forced upon children are often irreversible,” said Matt Sharp of ADF. I wrote it last year“And such drugs and procedures are not only dangerous, but experimental and unproven.” ADF did not respond to NPR’s request for comment on the story.
For the American Principles Project, the ban represents an “effort to curb the predatory transgender industry,” wrote director Terry Schilling. Statement of the WeekThe American Principles Project did not respond to multiple requests for comment from NPR on this story.
‘Nothing has changed’
These claims, and the speed with which lawmakers acted on them, are puzzling. Dr. Cade GephardtGoepferd, who is the chief education officer and medical director of the Gender Health Program at Children’s Minnesota Hospital, has provided similar care to gender-variant children for 20 years.
“Our approach to this treatment is not new. We are not using new medications. No groundbreaking new research has been published. Nothing has changed,” they say. “If anything, treatment has become more standardized and more guideline-based.”
All major medical organizations in the United States, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society, and the American Psychological Association, Supporting gender-affirming care As safe and necessary.
Erin ReidA transgender journalist and activist, she has been closely tracking these laws as they are passed through state legislatures.
“I’ve watched thousands of hours of legislative discussion on this issue, and I don’t think there’s another topic that’s currently devoting so much legislative time to state legislatures across the country,” she said. “Laws targeting queer and transgender people seem to be coming in waves throughout American history. This isn’t just an isolated incident.”
And she argues that this isn’t driven by any growing public concern: “Regardless of what people personally think about transgender care, they just don’t want lawmakers to spend their time on it.”
She points NORC-LA Times Poll A survey released in June found that 77% of Americans agree that “elected officials use the debate about transgender and non-binary people to distract from more pressing priorities.”
The push for such legislation also has a religious component. “When God created us, he created us male and female, and that’s it. There’s no other choice,” South Carolina House Majority Leader Davey Hiott, a Republican, told reporters in January. “We have to oppose anybody who wants to change that from birth or throughout their life.”
In May, South Carolina became the 25th state to enact a ban on gender-affirming care for young people.
Travel for care
Dawson points out that these laws cover the use of a range of medical interventions, not the medical interventions themselves, and he questions the assertion that drugs and hormone treatments are unsafe.
“There are exceptions for young people who need to receive the same prohibited services for care purposes other than gender reassignment,” Dawson noted. Nearly all of the regulations include penalties for health care workers, and some target parents, teachers, and counselors.
Gephardt’s Minnesota clinic has seen a roughly 30% increase in calls from patients since the bans in surrounding states.
“We’ve increased our medical and mental health staff to handle the demand, but the waiting list is still over a year,” they said — a long time for adolescents.
Having patients travel to Minnesota from other states every three months would be a logistical nightmare and complicate insurance coverage, Goepferd added. “We’re set up to take care of Minnesotans, not the entire Midwest.”
It’s not just the health care legislation that’s been passed, Executive Director Kellan Baker points out. Whitman Walker Institute“New restrictions are proposed and enacted almost daily, not just on transgender people’s ability to access health care as they move through the world, but also on their ability to, for example, attend school or play on a sports team,” he said.
In Baker’s view, state legislators who pass these laws are “attacking kids to score political points and taking advantage of the fact that many people may not know someone who is transgender,” he said. “There aren’t that many transgender people. The best estimates we have are that about 0.6 percent of the U.S. population self-identifies as transgender.”
