Story at a glance
- An Alabama House committee on Wednesday advanced legislation that would prohibit doctors from providing gender-affirming care to transgender or nonbinary minors.
- The bill would make prescribing puberty-blockers or hormones or performing gender-affirming surgery or other procedures on patients younger than 19 a felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
- The bill, which has already been passed by the state Senate, will now go before the full Alabama House of Representatives.
Representatives in Alabama on Wednesday advanced legislation that would prohibit doctors from providing gender-affirming care to transgender or nonbinary minors.
The bill, passed by the House Judiciary Committee, would make it a felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, for a doctor in Alabama to prescribe puberty-blockers or hormones or perform gender-affirming surgery or other procedures on patients younger than 19 years old. The committee on Wednesday also passed a nearly identical House version of the bill.
The bill, which last week was passed by the state Senate, now heads to the full Alabama House of Representatives. Should the House vote favorably on the legislation, it will move to the governor’s desk where it could be signed into law.
Rep. Wesley Allen (R), the sponsor of the House bill, argued on Wednesday that children under 18 are not mature enough to make their own decisions regarding gender-affirming care, and likened the bill to legislation passed to protect minors from alcohol, smoking and vaping, the Associated Press reported.
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“Adults are free to do what they want to do, but this is to protect children,” Allen told the committee on Wednesday. “It is not good to give these medications to these children, and I consider it to where it would be abuse to give these long-term drugs to these children.”
Alabama state Sen. Shay Shelnutt (R), who is sponsoring the Senate bill, raised similar concerns before the Senate last week, telling lawmakers: “We don’t want parents to be abusing their children. We don’t want to make that an option, because that’s what it is: It’s child abuse.”
Alabama House Democrats on Wednesday accused legislators backing the bill – and others like it – of overstepping their bounds.
“We’re not supposed to be here substituting our judgment for the person that’s closest to that child, and I personally believe that this legislation doesn’t protect children, it endangers them, and it also endangers their families,” Rep. Chris England, a Democrat, said, the Associated Press reported.
The bill’s passage comes as a slew of other anti-trans legislation moves through statehouses across the nation in rapid succession. In Texas, both the attorney general and the governor have called gender-affirming healthcare “child abuse,” and state agencies have been ordered to investigate cases of gender-affirming treatment as such.
To date, just one state — Arkansas — has passed legislation restricting access to gender-affirming services for minors, though a federal judge in July blocked its enforcement pending the outcome of an ACLU lawsuit.
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