A major children’s hospital in Oklahoma has ended gender-affirming hormone prescriptions and surgical procedures for minors after the state’s government passed a law withholding millions in federal COVID-19 relief money from providers who perform “gender reassignment medical treatment.”
The bill, SB 3XX, was passed by legislators in late September and signed into law by Gov. Kevin Stitt on Tuesday.
It appropriates more than $108 million of American Rescue Plan Act funds to University of Oklahoma-affiliated OU Health, including $39.4 million to build and expand its pediatric behavioral health care capacity.
The mental health money, however, comes under the condition that OU Health and its Oklahoma Children’s Hospital do not provide to minors certain care “to facilitate the transitioning of a patient’s assigned gender identity on the patient’s birth certificate, to the gender identity experienced and defined by the patient,” according to the bill (PDF).
This includes interventions to suppress the development of endogenous secondary sex characteristics or to align a patient’s physical appearance or body to their gender identity, as well as medical therapies or interventions used to treat gender dysphoria, according to the bill.
The health system is still permitted to receive funds if it is providing behavioral health care services or counseling, medications to treat depression and anxiety and other services provided “to individuals born with ambiguous genitalia, incomplete genitalia, or both male and female anatomy, or biochemically verifiable disorder of sex development," lawmakers wrote.
“By signing this bill today we are taking the first step to protect children from permanent gender transition surgeries and therapies,” Stitt said in a press release. “It is wildly inappropriate for taxpayer dollars to be used for condoning, promoting, or performing these types of controversial procedures on healthy children.”
The Republican governor, who is up for reelection in November, also called on the state’s lawmakers “to ban all irreversible gender transition surgeries and hormone therapies on minors” during the upcoming February session.
OU Health is one of the state’s largest health systems. Its Oklahoma Children’s Hospital offers mental health, nutritional and medical services to LGBTQ youth “including those moving toward gender affirmation” through its Adolescent Medicine Roy G. Biv Program.
The webpage detailing the program, however, was recently updated with a notice that the pediatric hospital had cut back on certain services.
“In light of the legislation signed by Governor Stitt, we have ceased hormone-related prescription therapies and surgical procedures for gender-affirming services on patients under the age of 18,” the system wrote in a statement. “OU Health provides care in accordance with all state and federal laws and in compliance with regulatory governing bodies.”
Political focus on pediatric gender-affirming care services has escalated over the past year.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, for instance, instructed his state’s child welfare agency to investigate those providing the services for abuse against children as Florida’s health department shared plans to restrict Medicaid insurance coverage for multiple gender dysphoria treatments. In August, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia, introduced federal legislation backed by 40 House Republications that would make it a felony to provide the services to minors.
High-profile, right-wing social media users have also been shining a spotlight on children’s hospitals in what provider organizations have described as an “intentional campaign of disinformation.” The activity has led to bomb threats, demonstrations and threatening messages directed toward several facilities and caregivers themselves.
Earlier this week, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association and the Children’s Hospital Association penned a joint letter denouncing the threats and called on the Department of Justice to open investigations into those responsible for the harassment campaign.