OPINION | Conservative WA Lawmakers Start 2024 With Reactionary Attacks on Gender-Affirming Care

by Megan Burbank

When Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization struck down nearly 50 years of precedent for abortion rights, it opened the door to a strange new reality we're still just beginning to understand. Without national protections for abortion, state legislatures are freshly empowered to restrict abortion access however they please, often through model legislation intended to be replicated elsewhere. That means it's especially important to keep tabs on potential health care restrictions on their way to statehouses across the country. This session, at least one has already been introduced in Olympia, alongside efforts to throttle access to gender-affirming care and limit free speech for transgender and nonbinary kids.

Here's what's popped up on my radar so far — and how local advocates are responding.

Banning Gender-Affirming Care for Youth

House Bill 2241, currently in the House Health Care & Wellness Committee, won't be surprising to anyone who's been paying attention to nationwide efforts to curtail access to gender-affirming care. The measure would make it a crime for clinicians to provide minors with puberty blockers, hormone therapy, or surgical interventions if they're administered as part of gender-affirming care.

It's worth noting that the bill contains exceptions for patients who need these services for reasons outside of gender-affirming care, which is a typical caveat baked into such policies, and in practice is a distinction without a difference: As I've previously discussed in this column, cisgender patients also rely on gender-affirming care, and the the scenarios described in the bill as exceptions outside the definition of gender-affirming care are actually great examples of it.

Despite what such framings might suggest, broad access to gender-affirming care is not controversial among mainstream leading medical organizations: The American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association both support it. It's also protected in Washington State under a "shield" law that guards clinicians and patients from being prosecuted for facilitating or seeking abortion or gender-affirming care.

This makes our state just one of 14 bucking a national trend toward restricting both services, reports the Movement Advancement Project. According to the independent research think tank, 22 states ban "best practice medication and surgical care for transgender youth," although not all of these are currently in effect.

Policing Students' Pronouns and Names in Public Schools

Senate Bill 6026, currently in the Senate's Early Learning & K-12 Education Committee, would make it a crime for school employees to use a student's name "or derivatives thereof" that don't appear on the student's birth certificate, or to use pronouns that don't align with the student's "biological sex," except with written permission from parents. The bill doesn't discipline the actions of students themselves — bills that impact youth rarely do — but instead prohibits teachers from using pronouns and names that align with a student's gender identity without express permission from parents, unless those terms and names already align with official documentation.

It's hard to see this as anything but an effort to crack down on free speech and self-expression for transgender and nonbinary youth, and, as written, the bill also seems fairly impossible to enforce. Not all nicknames are "derivatives" of a given name; would written permission be required for every nickname a child may want to use casually in school?

But that's not really the point. Bills like this are part of an ongoing conservative effort to reframe respectful language that affirms students' gender identities as a threat to free speech. In one high-profile case, the Alliance Defending Freedom is representing a Virginia French teacher who misgendered a student and then refused to use the student's correct pronouns. As Reuters reports, policies like SB 6062 are a reactionary response to the increasingly mainstream practice of using names and pronouns in educational settings that align with students' gender identities.

It's telling that the response to this has been to crack down on free speech in schools — and, as with many policies that impact minors, it's important to remember that not all young people can safely involve their family members in conversations about gender and sexuality. This bill would force them to.

Penalizing Abortion Providers

Senate Bill 6075, currently in the Senate Law & Justice Committee, would amend the State's legal code to make abortion providers subject to fines and imprisonment and remove legal protections for people who help facilitate abortions. Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates' Courtney Normand frames proposals like it as a reaction to last year's successful slate of policies that broadened and affirmed access to abortion and reproductive health care in Washington. "We will need to defend these liberties because we know those who threaten them will not back down until they have seen our rights stripped away. We have faith that the majority of Washington lawmakers will see through these attempts to take us backward," she said in a statement.

Meanwhile, in Idaho

Long an incubator for anti-abortion policies, the Idaho State Legislature kicked off its 2024 session in unsurprising fashion, this time with a bill that would change language in the state's legal code describing fetuses, swapping in "preborn child" instead. Though a favorite of the anti-abortion movement more broadly, "preborn child" is not a medical term, and Planned Parenthood has raised concerns that its introduction into the state's legal code would distance the state's laws from the medical spaces it regulates, "create legal ambiguity," and potentially jeopardize access to IVF treatments, which would be a compounding loss on top of the state's growing lack of maternity care.

Planned Parenthood's state director in Idaho, Mistie DelliCarpini-Tolman, put it this way: "At its best, H0381 is a harmful waste of precious time."

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