Three states are considering protections for gender-inclusive health healthcare.
Legislators in at least three states have been challenging the national trend and introducing bills to guarantee access to gender-affirming health services for transgender adults and youth in 2023.
At most three states pledged efforts to ensure access to gender-neutral healthcare for transgender teens and adult patients in 2023.
In the past year, more than a dozen states attempted to pass legislation to restrict or even ban access to health services. In addition, at least 20 bills aimed at medical treatment for transgender patients are being filed by at-least nine states in 2023.
However, these states are heading in the opposite direction, by introducing laws to safeguard medical care for transgender individuals:
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California
The legislation introduced earlier in the month of this year by a California state senator. Nancy Skinner (D) will prohibit an official from issuance of an arrest warrant to anyone who has been found guilty or accused of violating a law in another state concerning gender-affirming health care or abortion.
The bill will make it a crime for bail bondsmen to bring a person in custody without warrant. This could be punished by up to one year in jail. They may also see their licenses taken away.
Skinner’s bill will also establish an action civil for a person who has been detained in California to obtain or provide gender-neutral care or an abortion in a different state.
Three states mulling protections for gender-affirming health care via thehill https://t.co/yAVy5G3qiC pic.twitter.com/gcplLLJYUh
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“We want to make it clear to everyone across the country that California is safe for you,” Skinner spoke to KTVU at Oakland in the month of March. “We respect those rights, and we believe it is not the government’s responsibility, it is not the government’s role, to interfere with your reproductive choices or your gender identity choices.”
If it is passed, the law will expand the protections provided in a state law that protects parents of transgender children from criminal prosecution for breaking the laws of a different state, by traveling to California for gender-neutral healthcare for their child.
Illinois
A bill introduced on November 1st by Democratic Illinois state senator. Mike Simmons would establish the “Gender-Affirming Health Care Protection Act” to prevent the state’s government – including governors and law enforcement officials from taking civil or criminal actions against anyone who is accused of breaking a state’s laws pertaining to gender-affirming health care for young people.
“Access to health care is a basic human right, and access to gender-affirming care ought to be a protected right for communities that need it,” Simmons stated in a press release.
Montana
A bill that was introduced by Montana this month will require insurance companies to provide insurance coverage to “all gender-affirming care.”
The bill’s author, Democratic state Rep. Laurie Bishop, in a November Facebook post, following her reelection in midterm, pledged to focus her work during the upcoming legislative session on the right of patients to choose their own healthcare, as well as other topics.
