11 states considering bills to restrict transgender health care

• Major medical organizations, including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, uniformly recommend gender-affirming care but have faced legislative attacks and online threats.

Driving the news: Republican state lawmakers are focusing on gender-affirming health care, primarily targeting providers and the parents of trans youths.

• Eleven states — Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Virginia — have proposed new legislation so far. Many of the bills look to criminalize helping a trans child obtain the care they're seeking.
• Republican lawmakers in Oklahoma introduced a bill this week seeking to make it a felony for anyone under the age of 26 to access gender-confirming care.
• Meanwhile in Texas, at least a dozen anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been proposed in the first week of 2023, three of which seek to label providing gender-affirming care to minors a form of child abuse.

Of note: Anti-transgender campaigns resulted in the online harassment of 24 different hospitals and health care providers in 21 states over a recent four-month period, Axios' Ina Fried reports.

Go deeper:

• Almost half of trans people in U.S. are teens and young adults
• Culture war around care for transgender kids heats up
• At least 32 trans people killed in the U.S. in 2022: report