Louisiana bans gender-affirming care for minors

Gender-affirming healthcare will be illegal for minors in Louisiana as of Jan. 1, 2024, after state politicians overrode Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards’ veto of the bill late Tuesday.

The bill will ban hormone treatment, puberty blockers, surgery, and other types of gender-affirming medical care for patients under age 18, Reuters reported.

“I think that in this instance, in following other Southern states passing this bill, legislators put politics over people without considering the practical impacts of the bill,” Edwards said in his veto message. “I firmly believe that the legislature has overstepped its authority and is interfering in critical healthcare decisions that only parents should make in consultation with their children and their children’s physicians and psychologists.”

Twenty other states have passed similar bans on gender-affirming care, Reuters reported. In Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee, judges ruled the bans were unconstitutional, according to Reuters, though a federal court allowed Tennessee’s ban to take effect.

In May, every doctor in the adolescent medicine department at Dell Children’s Medical Center, an acute care pediatric hospital in Austin, Texas, left the hospital following an investigation into the hospital’s gender-affirming care services.

The American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Public Health Association, and a number of other major medical associations have endorsed gender-affirming care.

“Gender-affirming care is medically necessary, evidence-based care that improves the physical and mental health of transgender and gender-diverse people,” Michael Suk, an AMA board member, said in a June 2021 statement.

In May, Kellan Baker, executive director and chief learning officer at nonprofit community health center Whitman-Walker Health in Washington, DC, told Healthcare Brew that gender-affirming care bans are intended to create an environment of fear.

“You don’t even need a ban, you just need a threat of a ban to start shutting down portals to care,” he said. “The goal is to keep them in such a posture of fear of what could happen to them as a result of providing standard medical care to transgender people of any age, that they cease to provide that care.”