Oklahoma's Republican governor on
Tuesday signed a bill into law that withholds funds, including COVID
relief funds, from hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to
minors.
The law applies to healthcare
facilities owned by the University Hospitals Authority (UHA) or
University Hospitals Trust, including The Children's Hospital at OU
Medicine, Oklahoma's only full-service pediatric medical care
facility.
“It is wildly inappropriate for
taxpayer dollars to be used for performing these types of
controversial procedures,” Governor Kevin Stitt said.
The
law defines “gender reassignment medical treatment” to
include “interventions to suppress the development of endogenous
secondary sex characteristics,” “interventions to align the
patient's appearance or physical body with the patient's gender
identity,” and “medical therapies and medical intervention used
to treat gender dysphoria.”
Stitt, who earlier this year signed the
strictest abortion ban in the United States, said that he would call
on lawmakers to ban “all irreversible gender transition surgeries
and hormone therapies on minors.”
“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 statement. “It
is wildly inappropriate for taxpayer dollars to be used for
condoning, promoting, or performing these types of controversial
procedures on healthy children.”
“I am calling for the Legislature to
ban all irreversible gender transition surgeries and hormone
therapies on minors when they convene next session in February 2023.
We cannot turn a blind eye to what’s happening all across our
nation, and as governor I will not allow life-altering transition
surgeries on minor children in the state of Oklahoma,” he
said.
U.S. Secretary of Health and Human
Services Xavier Becerra called the law a “disturbing attack” on
“some of our country's most vulnerable children.”
Bacerra said that the services reduce
the risk of suicide.