Oklahoma governor signs bill withholding hospital funding over trans youth care

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signed a invoice Tuesday that can withhold Covid aid funds from one of many state’s largest hospital techniques except it stops offering gender-affirming medical care to minors.

The invoice signed by the first-term Republican, who’s up for re-election subsequent month, authorizes greater than $108 million in federal funds from the American Rescue Plan Act for well being companies on the College of Oklahoma Medical Heart.

However the well being system can solely obtain the funds if it ceases all gender-affirming medical care on these below 18. Oklahoma Kids’s Hospital at OU Well being at present provides medical companies associated to gender identification for these as much as age 24, together with puberty blockers, gender-affirming hormone remedy, and assist discovering surgeons who carry out gender-affirming surgical procedures, in line with its web site.

Stitt additionally referred to as for the GOP-controlled Legislature to ban a few of these gender-affirming therapies statewide when it returns in February, saying in a press release that he wished a prohibition on “all irreversible gender transition surgical procedures and hormone therapies” on minors.

Transgender medical remedy for kids and youths is more and more below assault in lots of Republican-led states, labeled as baby abuse and topic to criminalizing bans. Nevertheless it has been obtainable in the USA for greater than a decade and is endorsed by main medical associations.

Oklahoma’s motion comes amid a spate of threats towards docs and establishments that present medical take care of transgender youngsters, with kids’s hospitals nationwide growing safety and dealing with regulation enforcement.

OU’s Medical Heart mentioned in mild of the laws signed by Stitt, it had ceased hormone-related prescription therapies and surgical procedures for gender-affirming companies on sufferers below 18 years previous.

“The OU Well being Senior Management Group is proactively planning the ceasing of sure gender medication companies throughout our amenities and that plan is already below improvement,” the hospital system said in a press release to information shops.

State Sen. Carri Hicks, a Democrat, mentioned final week that about 100 kids obtain gender-affirming care at OU Kids’s, in line with The Oklahoman.

Dad and mom of these kids now might need to journey to Kansas or Colorado to seek out care, the Washington Publish reported.

Shane Poindexter mentioned that his 14-year-old son tried suicide earlier than going to the OU Kids’s clinic, the place he is been receiving remedy, together with hormone suppressants, for greater than a yr.

“It’s someplace they will go and be who they’re and be accepted. Youngsters are bullies,” Poindexter advised the Washington Publish. “It was mentally destroying him. The love and affection from that place is superb. We don’t know what we’re going to do now.”

Civil rights teams denounced the governor and Legislature for the brand new regulation.

“Medical choices belong to sufferers, their mother and father, and their docs,” Tamya Cox-Toure, government director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Oklahoma, mentioned in a press release. “But politicians, trying to enchantment to their base throughout an election yr, have continued their assaults on bodily autonomy by coming between these immediately impacted and the care they want and deserve.”

Oklahoma may face a lawsuit over the invoice. Federal and a few state legal guidelines bar federally funded well being applications from discriminating on the idea of intercourse. In consequence, the ACLU and different teams have efficiently argued in court docket that state Medicaid insurance policies, for instance, can not bar protection for gender-affirming take care of transgender folks if they supply those self same therapies — hormone remedy, puberty blockers and double mastectomies, amongst others — to cisgender folks to deal with different situations.

Oklahoma’s Legislature already focused transgender younger folks earlier this yr with new legal guidelines that prohibit their capability to play sports activities or use college loos in step with their gender identification.

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