Florida bill targets gender-affirming health care for trans youth, adults

Transgender youths and adults may soon find their access to gender-affirming medical care heavily restricted and their identities erased from official documents under sweeping legislation introduced Friday in the Florida House.

Under Florida’s newly proposed House Bill 1421, gender-affirming health care including puberty blockers, hormone therapy and surgeries will be outlawed for transgender minors. Transgender adults will be required to clear a number of additional regulatory hurdles to receive care in the state, including submitting a written consent form to their doctors each time they have an appointment.

The informed consent form must detail the long-term and short-term effects of gender-affirming medical care as well as the potential impact such care may have on a person’s physical and mental health, according to the bill, which also makes it easier for patients to sue their doctors within a 30-year statute of limitations.

Florida health care providers or hospital employees under the bill are protected from “any disciplinary or other recriminatory action” if they refuse to supply gender-affirming care to a consenting adult on “clinical, moral, or religious grounds.” The measure also bars state health insurance policies and health maintenance policies from covering gender-affirming care.

Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration has already eliminated Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming health care for transgender individuals of all ages. The state’s medical boards in February voted to adopt a set of rules that bar transgender youth younger than 18 from receiving puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy.

The legislation filed Friday also aims to prevent people born in Florida from amending their birth certificate to reflect a sex that is different from their sex assigned at birth, although exceptions exist for individuals whose genitalia was “unresolvably ambiguous” when they were born or in the case of scrivener’s error.

State Republican Rep. Randy Fine, who is sponsoring the legislation in the state House, tweeted Friday that his bill will ensure Florida residents are not forced into funding the “sexual mutilation of adults” and bring about justice for “those tricked into this evil.”

“That’s HB 1421 and I am proud to file it,” Fine said.

Fine in April pledged to introduce legislation this year that would make it illegal to provide gender-affirming health care to a minor, writing in a Twitter post that he’s “had enough.”

“I can say I’m a porcupine, but that doesn’t make it so,” Fine said at the time. “It is time to dispense with this fantasy making women’s sports a joke and our schools into a cesspool.”

Nikole Parker, the director of transgender equality at the LGBTQ advocacy group Equality Florida, said Friday in a statement that Fine’s bill is an effort to ban transgender people from existing entirely.

“It goes beyond denying us medical freedom to policing who we can be,” Parker, who is transgender, said. “Republican leadership is saying that from the moment of birth, you should not — and in important ways cannot — be recognized by anything other than your genitals. And from that bigoted place of denying the very humanity of transgender Floridians, they are ruthlessly bending the power of government to erase the community altogether.”

“Transgender people are neighbors, friends, family members. We exist and we matter,” Parker said. “This bill to rip away lifesaving health care, shred insurance coverage, and bar birth certificate access will cost lives.”

Gender-affirming health care for transgender individuals is supported by most major accredited medical organizations.