New Hampshire’s governor signed a bill into law today which bans gender affirming care for minors. New Hampshire is the first state in New England to pass such a ban.
New Hampshire has become the first state in New England to ban gender-affirming care medication for minors after Governor Kelly Ayotte signed House Bill 377 into law on Friday.
The new law prohibits healthcare providers from prescribing puberty blockers and hormone therapy for people under 18 when the medications are used by transgender youth as part of a gender transition…
The new law also allows someone who was harmed by receiving this care to bring a lawsuit against the person who provided the care and violated the law…
Ayotte also signed a second bill banning gender-affirming surgeries for minors. House Bill 712 restricts breast surgeries for minors so they would only be allowed to treat malignancy, injury, infection, or malformation, or for reconstructive surgery after one of those procedures.
More than half the states have laws banning gender affirming care at this point, but New Hampshire is the only one in New England. All the other states around it have shield laws to protect access to such care.
Today, a group of 16 states sued the Trump administration in an attempt to block investigations into medical centers providing such care. The effort is being led by New York AG Letitia James.
The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, argues that the administration, by threatening to prosecute providers, is trying to institute a national ban on puberty blockers, hormone therapy and surgeries for transgender minors even though Congress has enacted no such federal ban.
“The federal government is running a cruel and targeted harassment campaign against providers who offer lawful, lifesaving care to children,” New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is leading the coalition of states in the suit, said in a statement. “This administration is ruthlessly targeting young people who already face immense barriers just to be seen and heard, and are putting countless lives at risk in the process. In New York and nationwide, we will never stop fighting for the dignity, safety, and basic rights of the transgender community.”…
The complainants, 16 attorneys general and the governor of Pennsylvania, argue that transition care is legally protected in all of their states and that federal attempts to block the care “trammel on State power” in violation of the Tenth Amendment. They also argue that the administration’s actions force providers to make “an impossible choice” of either defying the federal threats or complying and violating their state’s laws against discrimination in medical care.
What this lawsuit is aiming to stop are decisions by hospitals which have recently stepped away from gender affirming care for minors out of concern about lawsuits and federal investigations.
Just in the last two months, the Children’s Hospital of Richmond at VCU, Yale New Haven Health, Connecticut Children’s Medical Center, Children’s National Hospital, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, UChicago Medicine and the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles have announced they will end gender-affirming care programs for minors and, in most cases, anyone under 19.
They left out Kaiser Permanente which operates in 8 states and announced it was cutting off gender affirming care for minors last week. California briefly tried to reverse this trend earlier this year by threatening to sue Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, but while the youth gender clinic there did agree to remain open the decision only lasted a few months. Simply put, the risk of lawsuits was too great. California and other states may say that gender affirming care is legal but if a hospital expects to be sued for millions of dollars for removing the breasts of a 13-year-old or giving testosterone to children, it can’t keep doing those things and expect to survive.
Even if this suit succeeds with some federal judge in Massachusetts, it will eventually be shot down by an appeals court or the Supreme Court. That’s the likely outcome here but we may have to wait a few months to see it play out. This is now the 31st lawsuit that Letitia James has joined against the Trump administration in the past six months.
