Florida is set to begin the process of banning all gender-affirming healthcare for minors, despite mountains of evidence that such care vastly improves trans children’s quality of life and that its restriction can have dire consequences.
Florida’s Board of Medicine voted to begin the process of updating its rules in a public hearing on Friday in Fort Lauderdale, Politico reports. In addition to voting to ban hormone replacement therapy and transition-related surgeries for minors, the board also voted to update its rules to add additional red tape for adults seeking gender-affirming care, including longer waiting periods and paperwork. Trans adults would additionally be made to sign informed consent forms approved by the Board, which the Human Rights Campaign referred to as “full of extreme and misleading statements.” This is despite the fact that The Florida Department of Health (FDOH) will take a 120-day period to craft rules around state guidelines, according to local news outlet News 6.
The hearing lasted more than three and a half hours, which included a public comment period, and featured testimony from physicians and community organizers. Marnie Bialosuknia, the mother of a trans child who started hormones at age 17, told News 6 that the ban “would be absolutely devastating, and you already are dealing with a community that’s marginalized; you’re dealing with a community that has a very high rate of suicidal thoughts, attempted suicide.”
“I can only speak from my personal experience as a mother of a transgender child. If I had to say to my child, ‘You can’t continue with this therapy,” I don’t know that she would be here with us, and that’s really, really scary,” Bialosuknia said. “You have to trust these parents that they know what’s best for their children that they’re going under the guidance of a physician.”
The “evidence” that Florida has used to prove the supposed harms of transition-related care has been extensively debunked. One of the FDOH’s reports discussed in the hearing claims that most trans children seeking clinical care will “lose their desire to identify with the non-birth sex,” and that such care has “potentially irreversible consequences such as cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, infertility, increased cancer risk, and thrombosis.” This contradicts medical consensus, which overwhelmingly supports the usage of puberty blockers and hormone therapy for trans youth.
Additionally, the DOH’s report twisted the work of researchers to support the unfounded notion that transition-related care for minors is harmful, according to a recent report from Vice. The publication spoke to 10 researchers who were not aware that their work was being used by the state of Florida, and who condemned the framing of their research as misleading and inaccurate. Dr. Ken Pang, who published the first wide-scale analysis of transition-related care for trans children, told Vice that Florida had decontextualized a sentence from his six-year-old report to assert that there was no psychosocial and cognitive impact.
“It seems rather disingenuous for the Florida Department of Health to be using what they presumably know to be an out-of-date statement to support a blanket ban on gender-affirming care,” Pang told VICE, “while at the same time ignoring the more recent evidence which shows, for instance, that gender-affirming medical care is associated with improvements in mental health."
The hearing occurred as the result of guidance from the Florida Department of Health issued in April, urging an end to not just medical transition for youth, but social transition as well. “Social transition” entails changes such as wearing gender-affirming clothing and/or using a different name or pronouns. The DOH also recommended that children and adolescents should be provided social support by peers, and “seek counseling from a licensed provider,” in lieu of transitioning. (It’s worth noting that Florida is currently prevented from enforcing conversion therapy bans due to an appellate court decision that found that said bans violated the First Amendment.) These guidelines, however, do not apply to intersex children.
The meeting also happened just days after Florida Governor Ron DeSantis ousted State Attorney Andrew Warren, a Democrat, for refusing to prosecute Florida’s recently passed abortion ban and for signing a letter that opposed Texas’ ban on trans-affirming care.
Advocates spoke out against the vote, with Lambda Legal, Southern Legal Counsel, Florida Health Justice Project, and National Health Law Program issuing a joint statement. The organizations called the move “contrary to the evidence-based and overwhelming consensus that gender-affirming medical care for the treatment of gender dysphoria is safe, effective, and medically necessary.”
“The proposal is based on clear animus towards transgender people as well as junk science,” the statement reads, adding that it is also “unconstitutional and unlawful.” “Florida authorities need to stop playing politics with transgender people’s health care and endangering transgender people’s lives.”
Five other states have limited transition-related care for minors, according to the legislative tracker Movement Advancement Project. Those states include Arizona, Arkansas, Alabama, and Tennessee, as well as Texas, although Texas’ ban is based on an executive order and not enshrined in legislation. Considering that Texas and Florida have both taken the extralegal route, and have generally served as trailblazers when it comes to the cause of eliminating queer and trans children from existence, other Republican-controlled states might follow suit.
Get the best of what’s queer. Sign up for Them’s weekly newsletter here.