Michigan House Republicans Introduce Bill to Halt Gender-Affirming Surgeries and Care for Minors
Ban would include hormone therapy
More than a dozen Republican lawmakers in Michigan have signed onto a bill to bar physicians from performing gender-affirming care for transitioning minor patients.
This effort follows multiple executive orders from President Donald Trump asserting the “biological reality of sex”, threatening to revoke federal funding from medical providers offering gender-affirming care to children, directing transgender athletes to be removed from women’s sports, barring transgender service people from military service and directing the U.S. Government to recognize “female” and “male” as the only two sexes.
The bill on health care introduced last week, House Bill 4190, would ban gender-affirming surgical care, as well as hormone therapies for minor patients. Under the bill, a physician could continue prescribing hormone treatments if the patient has been a resident and began treatment before the bill’s effective date and if the stoppage of such treatment would cause harm to the minor.
During a news conference to call on Michigan to bar transgender athletes from competing on girls youth sports teams, lead sponsor on the House bill, Rep. Jason Woolford (R-Howell), said Michigan, which helped put Trump back in the White House, has made its voice known on what he called “radical transgender ideology” in government.
“…from the State House to the White House, we are saying that we will no longer allow our daughters and women to be taken advantage of by insecure men, haters of women, radical transgender ideology and those who choose to stand in silence,” Woolford said. “We today are no longer standing in silence for our women and children.”
Trump’s executive order asserting that the United States would not fund gender-affirming care has resulted in even blue states like Michigan seeing stoppages in care for transgender patients. Two federal judges have put pauses on Trump’s order to restrict gender-affirming care, but still health systems are in limbo with taking on new patients who could be harmed by potential sudden stoppages of care.
Lack of access and legislative barriers on gender-affirming care have stark negative consequences for physical and mental wellness for transgender patients, several studies have found.
The policies proposed under the bill are not being presented with coherent, unbiased or accredited research, Emme Zanotti, advocacy and outreach director of Equality Michigan said. The very mention in the bill of the “harm” of ceasing care seems to serve as an acknowledgement that gender-affirming care saves lives.
It’s a dangerous game at the executive and state level to impose policies like those included in the bill which put kids lives at risk, Zanotti said, and it’s a steep price to pay for “cheap political points”.
“They’re just playing politics with people’s lives and they’re trying to distract working people from issues that actually impact them,” Zanotti said. “And they’re doing so by going after a smaller subset of working families in the state of Michigan and taking away their access to health care, for their families, for their kids and that’s all it is.”
This article has been republished courtesy of Michigan Advance under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
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