A slate of state laws takes effect in Louisiana with the new year, including a measure restricting options for gender-affirming health care available to transgender youth.

Louisiana’s Legislature passed that law in July when it overrode a veto by outgoing Gov. John Bel Edwards, bringing the state closer to enacting a number of Republican priorities that Edwards, a Democrat, had mostly staved off during his two terms in office.

The law aligns Louisiana with other GOP-controlled states that have moved to restrict access to gender-affirming care. It comes amid a nationwide rise in anti-LGBTQ+ lawmaking by Republican-controlled statehouses.

Now, with GOP Gov.-elect Jeff Landry poised to be inaugurated on Jan. 8, the party’s priorities in areas like LGBTQ+ rights, public safety and fiscal issues face a clearer path in Louisiana. When the Legislature last year passed two bills to restrict discussion of gender and sexuality in classrooms, Edwards vetoed them, and lawmakers failed to override him on those measures. Landry’s allies are already discussing new public safety measures they say present a better path forward than the state’s 2017 bipartisan criminal justice laws — a signature achievement of Edwards’ tenure.

Other bills passed during the 2023 regular session take effect on Monday, too, but few had the political profile of the ban on gender-affirming care.

Among them are measures that change the way the state calculates minimum child-support payments, implement standards for pet insurers and set rules around police reporting of traffic stop data.

Health care for transgender youth

The ban on gender-affirming care became a priority of Republican state lawmakers during Louisiana’s 2023 regular legislative session.

The target of Pollock Republican Rep. Gabe Firment’s bill is a swath of health care options for children experiencing gender dysphoria, or feelings of distress due to differences in their gender identity and the sex they were assigned at birth.

The bill focused on procedures that alter patients’ bodies by banning surgeries, hormone therapies and puberty-blocking drugs. It also imposes penalties for doctors who violate the ban.

Transgender youth can still receive counseling under the new law, Act 466.

The bill’s supporters argued during the legislative session that children are ill-equipped to make decisions about the procedures and claimed, without providing any data or expert testimony, that doctors are pressuring large numbers of youth to receive the care.

Doctors testified during the session that only a handful of Louisiana providers offered the procedures outlawed by the bill, and did so for a very small number of children. Those who do generally advise counseling for younger children and tend to approve treatments that alter patients’ bodies only in their late teenage years, after careful discussion and years of counseling, doctors said. 

Doctors, transgender teenagers and their families have faced difficult decisions since the Legislature overturned Edwards’ veto of Firment’s bill during a special session in July. Some have left the state, while providers who remain are evaluating how they can continue to care for patients within the bounds of the law.

“I can tell you that effective January 1, 2024, Children’s Hospital New Orleans will modify its transgender care services to meet requirements specified in the law,” Dr. Mark Kline, director of Children’s Hospital New Orleans, said in a statement. “We will work with patients and families to ensure continuity of our patients’ health and well-being, within the bounds of the law.”

Pet insurance and traffic stops

Louisiana’s embattled homeowner’s insurance marketplace has made headlines in recent months. But it’s insurance for pets — not roofs and windows — that will see tougher regulations under a law taking effect in January.

The pet insurance measure, Act 94, authored by a Slidell Republican Rep. Mary DuBuisson, allows pet owners who buy insurance for their critters two weeks to return the policy. It will require insurers to disclose formulas they use to determine claim payments. And it lets insurers exclude coverage based on pets’ preexisting health conditions, among a long list of other provisions.

And in a law dealing with Louisiana State Police, Act 217 sponsored by Baton Rouge Democratic Rep. C. Denise Marcelle, the agency must keep logging certain traffic stop data, barring it from using a reporting exemption available to agencies with written policies against racial profiling.

State Police is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice over its troopers’ beatings of Black motorists.

Go to legis.la.gov for a full list of state laws taking effect Jan. 1.