Florida medical boards vote to ban gender-affirming care for minors

On Friday, the Florida Board of Medicine voted to draft legislation which would ban gender transition surgery for minors.

The ruling, which will ban minors from receiving puberty blockers, hormone therapy or surgeries as treatment for gender dysphoria, was passed after 5 hours of debate and protests.

At the end of the meeting, protesters could be heard shouting “Shame!” at the board members, and some of the protestors went on to stage a “die-in” in the lobby of the Orlando International Airport, where the meeting was held.

They displayed signs saying, “Denied care,” “Killed by state apathy,” and “RIP trans youth.”

The fight against allowing minors to receive transitioning procedures has largely been led by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, who in April issued non-binding guidance through the Florida Health Department which aimed to ban “social gender transition” and gender-affirming medical care for minors.

The guidance was criticized by many, including accredited medical groups such as the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Association, who, according to NBC News, support gender-affirming treatments for youth.

Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration issued a report in June that found “several services for the treatment of gender dysphoria — i.e., sex reassignment surgery, cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers — are not consistent with widely accepted professional medical standards and are experimental and investigational with the potential for harmful long-term effects.”

However, Dr. Meredithe McNamara, who is an assistant professor of pediatrics at Yale School of Medicine said that the research cited in the June report was methodologically flawed.

“Neither of the authors of the state’s review is a subject matter expert,” McNamara said, according to NBC News. “One individual is a dentist. The other is a post-doctoral fellow in biostatistics. At a bare minimum, the systematic review should be conducted by those who are qualified to assess the literature. I wouldn’t trust a dermatologist review of the literature on a neurosurgical procedure, for instance.”