An overwhelming majority of states located in the American South have passed laws banning so-called “gender-affirming care” for children under 18, which includes hormone therapy, puberty blockers, and genital mutilation surgery.
As reported by The Hill, 12 of the 16 states that are generally considered Southern have put such laws on the books since 2021, which amounts to over half of all transgender bans across the country. The laws generally forbid medical professionals from performing such treatments on minors, with laws in Florida and Missouri even going so far as to prohibit such procedures for adults.
The remaining four Southern states – South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware – have not yet passed such laws, although Republicans in the state legislatures of Virginia and South Carolina did introduce similar legislation earlier this year.
In three of the 12 states that have passed such laws – Louisiana, Kentucky, and North Carolina – the Democratic governors all vetoed these bills, only to have their vetoes overridden by the GOP-dominated legislatures. The Arkansas state legislature did the same in 2021, when then-Governor Asa Hutchinson (R-Ark.) vetoed a trans ban, thus passing into law the first such ban in the nation.
Far-left activists who support transgenderism – the false and scientifically-debunked notion that there are more than two genders, and that anyone can simply choose to change their gender whenever they feel like it – have lamented their failure to stop such legislation due to the Republican Party’s dominance in the region.
“Many of the states in the South are effectively a single-party government,” said Logan Casey, senior policy researcher for the Movement Advancement Project.
“We’ve seen a long history of the South being used as a laboratory for anti-LGBT legislation,” complained Adam Polanski, director of communications at the Campaign for Southern Equality.
As such, left-wing organizations have tried to raise money to fund the travel costs for families who falsely believe their children are “trans,” so that they can make the trips to states that do support such practices, which are often located hundreds of miles away.
Although activists have sued to try to have such bans overturned, the courts have begun deciding in favor of the state bans. In July, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals lifted an injunction that had been placed on Tennessee’s trans ban by a lower court. The same Circuit Court similarly lifted an injunction on Kentucky’s ban just six days later. And on Monday, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals lifted a year-long injunction on Alabama’s ban.
“The use of these medications in general — let alone for children — almost certainly is not ‘deeply rooted’ in our nation’s history and tradition,” the three-judge panel wrote in their decision.