On Monday, Democratic Rep. Becca Balint introduced the Transgender Health Care Access Act. The bill, co-sponsored by nearly thirty Democrats, aims to expand access to sex-trait modification interventions for both children and adults by increasing availability in rural areas via community health centers, and by increasing the pool of “trained” providers by funding “affirming care” training grants. Ironically, the bill refers to “affirming care” as “evidence-based, lifesaving health care for transgender people,” but this claim is not substantiated with any academic citations. Instead, the bill refers to “strong medical consensus,” and favorably cites position statements by medical organizations, including the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.
On Tuesday, California lawmakers shot down two bills which aimed to regulate participation in sex-segregated school sports by making participation contingent on biological sex rather than “gender identity.” More specifically, AB 89 requires the California Interscholastic Federation to “amend its constitution, bylaws, and policies, to prohibit a pupil whose sex was assigned male at birth from participating on a girls’ interscholastic sports team.” Meanwhile, AB 844 conditions participation in “sex-segregated school programs and activities, including athletic teams and competitions, and access to school facilities, at elementary, secondary, and postsecondary institutions” on one’s biological sex. Democratic opposition argued that the bills did not do enough to help female athletes, and only targeted trans-identified athletes.
Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell signed into law legislation which codifies the state’s “shield law” protecting access to “affirming care” into the city’s municipal code. The legislation was unanimously approved by the city council. “Seattle is a city where diversity is celebrated, and the LGBTQ+ community is not just accepted, but embraced…The egregious attempts by the Trump administration to target, discriminate, and dehumanize LGBTQ+ people, particularly transgender individuals, and strip them of their rights goes directly against our city’s values” Mayor Harrell said in a statement.
A second federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of the Trump administration's EO which excludes gender dysphoric and trans-identified individuals from serving in the military. Trump’s EO maintains that the “mental health constraints” associated with gender dysphoria and transgenderism are incompatible with the military’s “high standards for troop readiness, lethality, cohesion, honesty, humility, uniformity, and integrity.” In a 65-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Benjamin Settle rejected the administration’s logic, calling the policy “unsupported, dramatic and facially unfair.” He goes on to add that “The government falls well short of its burden to show that banning transgender service is substantially related to achieving unit cohesion, good order, or discipline. Although the Court gives deference to military decision making, it would be an abdication to ignore the government's flat failure to address plaintiffs' uncontroverted evidence that years of open transgender service promoted these objectives.” The Justice Department has filed a notice declaring its intent to appeal the decision.
According to Nature, The Trump White House has tasked the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the National Institutes of Health with prioritizing research that studies outcomes, particularly harms, associated with sex-trait modification procedures and social transition, as well as regret and detransition following social and medical interventions. While one critic described the directive as creating a “distorted research ecosystem” where only “politically favourable findings are permitted to exist,” the directive arguably serves as a necessary countermeasure to the NIH’s previous position, where “affirming care” was functionally endorsed across the institutes despite a dearth of supporting evidence, and the medical needs of detransitioners were dramatically understudied.
District Court Judge Shane Vannatta has issued a temporary restraining order blocking enforcement of Montana’s HB121, a law which requires educational institutions to condition access to sex-segregated facilities on the basis of sex and prohibits male athletes from competing in female athletics. The judge determined that the law was “motivated by animus” and failed to justify how it protects the safety of women and girls. HB121 was signed into law on March 27th but was challenged shortly after by the ACLU of Montana.
Last Thursday, Kentucky’s Republican-led legislature formally overrode Gov. Andy Beshear’s veto of HB495, a bill which undoes Beshear’s executive order prohibiting counselors and clinicians from engaging in “conversion practices” relating to a minor’s “gender identity” and sexual orientation. The bill was modified during the veto recess to also include provisions prohibiting Medicaid from covering the use of cross-sex hormones and sex-reassignment surgery. Gov. Beshear issued his executive order in September of 2024, at the time joining at least 23 other states with similar “conversion” bans in place.
The Telegraph writes about the release of a new independent report commissioned by the UK’s previous conservative government to better understand how public bodies collect sex-based data. The report was catalyzed by concerns that key organizations had been infiltrated by “gender ideology,” leading to the institutional conflation of sex and gender, and as a result, compromised data on biological sex. The report’s author–Alice Sullivan, a professor of sociology and a quantitative data scientist at University College London–has maintained for years that we need data on both sex and “gender identity.” The report ultimately concludes that since 2015, at key entities like the NHS, schools, law enforcement agencies, and the civil service, accurate data on biological sex has been replaced by subjective data relating to “gender identity.” “This review is devastatingly clear about the harms caused by carelessness with sex data and a decade-long failure of the Civil Service to maintain impartiality and uphold data standards. The destruction of data about sex has caused real harm to individuals and research, and undermined the integrity of policy-making. Conflating sex and gender identity is not a harmless act of kindness but a damaging dereliction of duty” declared Maya Forstater, the CEO of pressure group Sex Matters.
In Gender Clinic News, Bernard Lane writes about the controversy over a 2023-2024 “evidence check” commissioned by the government of New South Wales which endorsed “affirming care” and referred to puberty blockers as “safe, effective and reversible.” The review was carried out by the Sax Institute, a non-profit that claims its mission is to advance evidence-based policy. A staffer for the New South Wales health department, however, wondered how the findings of the Sax Review could diverge from the findings of the UK’s Cass Report, and other reviews conducted in Finland, Sweden, and the U.S. state of Florida. In documents acquired via the Government Information (Public Access) Act, it came to light that in some cases the “Sax evidence check assigns the highest level of evidence to articles by authors undertaking a narrative review of poor-quality, small, methodologically flawed studies located through a systematic search.” These same narrative reviews and case series were excluded by the Cass Review because they were deemed too unreliable to guide clinical practice.
Joseph Figliolia
Policy Analyst
News