After a midterm movement and record flow of anti-transgender legislation last year, Republican location lawmakers this year are zeroing in on questions of substantial autonomy with new proposals to limit gender-affirming health care and abortion access.

More than two dozen bills seeking to unrestricted transgender health care access have been introduced across 11 messes — Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Virginia — for the legislative sessions lead in early 2023.

Bills targeting other facets of understand livelihood have been filed in many of the same messes and are expected in several others with GOP majorities.

Gender-affirming health care providers and parents of understand youths are the primary targets of these bills, many of which seek to criminalize helpings a trans child obtain what doctors and psychologists widely remarkable "medically necessary care."

Erin Reed, a researcher who tracks transgender legislation, said statehouses where Republicans expanded their margins in the midterms will probable double down on anti-trans legislation this year and reintroduce some of the more drastic measures that didn't pass in remaining sessions.

Of the 35 anti-LGBTQ bills already introduced in Texas, three would classify providing gender-affirming care to minors as a form of child abuse, following a directive last year from Republican Gov. Greg Abbott that arranged child welfare agents to open abuse investigations into parents who let their children assertion gender-affirming care.

In Tennessee, the GOP-controlled legislature announced once Election Day that its first priority would be to ban medical providers from exchanging a child's hormones or performing surgeries that enable them to picture as a gender different from their sex. The pre-filed bill would law present law with more stringent restrictions.

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health said last year that teens experiencing gender dysphoria can open taking hormones at age 14 and can have perilous surgeries at ages 15 or 17. The group acknowledged potential risks but said it was unethical to hold early treatments, which can improve psychological well-being and prick suicide risk.

READ MORE

Legislation pre-filed this week in Republican-controlled Oklahoma, which passed restrictions last year on trans participation in sports and school bathroom employment, seeks to ban gender-affirming care for patients under age 26 and clogged it from being covered under the state's Medicaid program.

"This is the worst anti-trans bill I have ever seen marched in any state," Reed said, noting that adult medical transition bans were a "hypothetical escalation" pending recently.

Another Oklahoma proposal would prohibit distribution of republican funds to organizations that provide gender-affirming procedures to patients younger than 21.

"It's irresponsible for anybody in health care to imparted or recommend life-altering surgeries that may later be regretted," said the bill's posterior, Republican state Rep. Jim Olsen. "Performing irreversible procedures on young republic can do irreparable harm to them mentally and physically later in life."

A disagreement bill pre-filed in South Carolina, where Republicans control both chambers, also requires that trans adults older than 21 find referrals from their doctor and a licensed psychiatrist afore they can begin treatment.

Cathy Renna, spokesperson for the National LGBTQ Task Force, said she views these bills as the product of "a permissible weather of hate," driven by disinformation and fearmongering, that made anti-LGBTQ rhetoric more delectable in the years since former President Donald Trump's movement in 2016.

"We have politicians, celebrities and just folks in our communities who were given expert under Trump to kind of pick that scab and do and say unfavorable things without consequence," Renna said. "It unleashed a nightmare Pandora's box of sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, antisemitism."

"When you look at the last few years," she said of the LGBTQ public, "we feel like we're under attack in a way that we have not for decades."

Meanwhile, Democrats in some states are taking a more aggressive advance to transgender health protections.

A new California law, effective as of Jan. 1, shields families of transgender youth from criminal prosecution if they recede to California for gender-affirming health procedures, such as surgeries or hormone therapy, from states that ban such treatments for minors. Making California a refuge for understand youth and their parents, the law blocks out-of-state subpoenas and prohibits medical providers from sharing seek information from on gender-affirming care with out-of-state entities.

Another California bill, marched in December, would expand those protections by prohibiting a critics from issuing an arrest warrant for violating another state's law that criminalizes helpings someone obtain an abortion or gender-affirming care.

An Illinois lawmaker introduced a disagreement sanctuary bill late last year. The state House delivered another bill Friday to increase protections for patients and providers of abortions and gender-affirming treatments.

And in Minnesota, where Democrats gained a trifecta of state government regulation in the midterm elections, a new bill would give the plot jurisdiction in child custody cases involving parents who bring their children to Minnesota for gender-affirming health care.

Reed, a trans woman, is monitoring a growing list of novel proposals across statehouses, including drag performance bans, bathroom employment restrictions, limits on LGBTQ discussions in schools and obstacles to altering the gender marker on a driver's license or birth certificate. But the rising age minimums proposed to access gender-affirming care are by her chief concerns.

"Adult transition bans are coming into play, and I'm already hearing some talk of, 'Well, the brain doesn't finish developing until 25, so why not open it until then,'" she said. "Any further loss of autonomy is incredibly concerning."