A BRUTAL UTAH SESSION COMES

Ban on transgender treatments for minors passes in first days of the session; governor signs

First out of the gate for the 2023 legislative session was a bill sponsored by Sen. Michael S. Kennedy drafted a substitute bill to SB16, which would prohibit Utah doctors from performing “sex characteristic surgical procedures” on a minor.

Before the Health and Human Services Interim Committee hearing during the October interim session of the Utah Legislature, Kennedy said it was “with some reluctance that [he] enter into the policy debate regarding the health care of transgender minors.”

He went on to misstate the policies supported by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and the Endocrine Society, saying the organizations are against sex changes in minors.

He also characterized such surgeries as “weak” and “novel.”

In his new draft, the bill would require the Utah Dept. of Health to study hormonal and transgender treatments, require the Division of Professional Licensing to create a certification for providing “hormonal transgender treatments,” and prohibit health care providers from using hormonal treatments for any new patients, threatening such doctors with a malpractice suit.

Transgender advocate Sue Robbins explains the bill in lay-person terms.

“If you take this to a high level to weed out specifics, the bill allows continuing of existing, ongoing treatment programs for minors but will block new treatment programs. A study will be conducted by Health and Human Services and that will be used for future decisions by the legislature,” she said. “We have seen this malpractice verbiage before and it ultimately makes doctors back away from providing healthcare either to remove risk or due to increased insurance. This is a very dangerous insertion.”

The bill passed its first senate committee on the second day of the session, and passed the Utah Senate the next day on a party-line vote.

The House passed the bill (also on a party-line vote) one week later, and the governor signed it the next day.

Conversion therapy bill goes from opening door to the practice to banning it, with clarification

In an August interim session of the Utah State Legislature, it became apparent that several LGBTQ issues would be brought to the 2023 Utah Legislative Session, including reversing the ban on so-called conversion therapy.

Legislators were still stinging that Utah Gov. Spencer Cox’s administration banned conversion therapy through a Division of Professional Licensing rule in 2020. The rule was nearly exactly that of a failed 2019 bill.

Rep. Brady Brammer, R-Highland, brought the issue to the interim session out of “concern” about how the rule came to exist. He even went as far as to say that there was no need for a ban on the practice.

“There are past medical procedures that have been disfavored, and they drop out naturally,” Brammer said in the committee hearing on the proposal. He mentioned bloodletting, a practice that ended in the 1800s, as a procedure no longer used but never outlawed in the state.

“Why do we treat this differently?”

The committee passed the proposal favorably, and