Bills in Alabama and Idaho threatening to strip essential health care from trans youth and imprison their medical providers recently became the first of many such measures introduced this year to pass a legislative chamber in their respective states. In the face of this extreme onslaught by conservative lawmakers, local media has largely failed to provide coverage that fully conveys or contextualizes the radical nature of these bills that are now one step closer to becoming law.
Media Matters found 15 local news articles on these pieces of legislation published in their respective states between February 3 and March 13, and two-thirds of those articles fail to note that the type of care being targeted is supported by every major medical organization in America. Almost half of the articles similarly fail to push back against false, scaremongering rhetoric used in the bills and by their supporters concerning gender confirmation surgeries for trans children. (No such surgeries are performed on minors in the U.S.) Notably, the study found an improvement in coverage providing the perspective of those directly impacted by these bills compared to similar measures last year, with 80% of the new articles quoting either a trans person or the parent of a trans child who stood to be affected.
These attacks on trans youth are focused on legislation at the state-level, with 37 bills to ban gender-affirming care for trans youth proposed in state legislatures so far this year. Local media holds an important position as a trusted source of information in communities across the country, making fairness and accuracy in local coverage of these issues a vital tool for voters to understand the dangers of bills targeting trans youth.
Idaho and Alabama are close to passing bills that would strip trans youth of necessary care and threaten medical providers and parents with felonies up to life imprisonment
On March 8, the Idaho House of Representatives passed House Bill 675, with all but one Republican member voting to advance it to the state Senate. The bill, introduced on February 23, would appropriate the state’s ban on female genital mutilation, a violent breach of human rights, in order to ban gender-affirming care for minors, including puberty blockers and hormone replacement medication. Further demonstrating the extreme nature of this proposal, HB 675 stipulates that medical providers who provide this necessary care could face life imprisonment. Going one step further than similar anti-trans legislation, Idaho’s bill would also make it a felony for parents to take their children out of state for gender-affirming care. This legally dubious measure, like the threat of life imprisonment, echoes right-wing attacks on abortion access in legislation like Missouri’s House Bill 2012, revealing a deeper shared Republican strategy in their manufactured culture war on health care.
Alabama’s Senate Bill 184, introduced on February 3 and passed by the state Senate on February 24, and companion House Bill 266, also introduced on February 3 and awaiting committee approval, would ban all gender-affirming care for minors (18-year-olds are considered minors under Alabama law and therefore subject to the proposed ban). As in Idaho, Alabama’s bills would make the provision of gender-affirming care for trans youth a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison for medical providers. Both Alabama bills would also require schools to disclose any “information related to a minor's perception that his or her gender or sex is inconsistent with his or her sex,” essentially forcing schools to out trans students.
The bills would also outlaw gender-affirming surgery for trans youth despite the fact that such surgeries are not performed on underage individuals. Emphasizing the divide between this legislation and accepted science, the bills include an exception that would allow doctors to continue harmful and medically unnecessary surgeries on intersex children, despite such procedures being opposed by the intersex community as well as medical and human rights organizations. This cruel legal carve-out is included in many of the new bills targeting trans health care across the country.
These bills represent a tangible threat to trans youth, their families, and the medical professionals who treat them. Idaho’s bill and Alabama’s SB 184 are the first bills banning puberty blockers and hormone replacement medications to be passed by a state legislative chamber this year (A similar measure, House Bill 1570, was passed in Arkansas last year and briefly became law after both legislative chambers overrode the governor’s veto, before being halted by a court ruling). If they pass committee, the only things standing between either bill becoming law is passing one more chamber of their respective state legislatures -- both of which have Republican supermajorities -- and being signed by the states’ governors -- both of whom have previously signed anti-trans legislation.
According to Chase Strangio, deputy director for transgender justice at the American Civil Liberties Union, Alabama’s SB 184 could receive a vote in the House as early as this week.
Local print and online news coverage has mostly failed to convey this legislative assault on trans youth
Between February 3 -- when the first of the bills was introduced -- and March 13, Media Matters found just 15 articles were written by local news outlets (six in Alabama and nine in Idaho) on the legislation for either print or online publication.
While the limited coverage can likely be attributed, at least in part, to the decline of local media spurred by years of newsroom layoffs and the COVID-19 pandemic, many of the published articles also failed to provide essential context for legislation criminalizing trans health care for minors. Only a third of the articles contextualized the care targeted in these bills as widely supported by the medical community, a necessary part of the story for readers to understand the dangers of outlawing health care for trans youth.
As Dr. James L. Madara of the American Medical Association wrote in a letter last year to the National Governors Association opposing such legislation: