Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) signed a bill last week permitting religiously based discrimination in adoption and foster care, his third recent anti-LGBTQ law. At the end of March, he also signed two laws targeting transgender youth.
Let’s take these one at a time. SB 1399 lets taxpayer-funded adoption and foster care agencies discriminate against LGBTQ parents and others if serving them goes against the provider’s religious beliefs. Arizona is now the 12th state to pass a law allowing religiously based discrimination in child services. (The others are Alabama, Kansas, Michigan, Mississippi, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia; all but Alabama and Michigan allow them to do so even if they receive taxpayer money.)
Arizona can ill afford to turn away any otherwise qualified foster parent. As HRC notes, “Arizona is experiencing a shortage of licensed foster homes for children in foster care: the number of households offering a foster home for Arizona children has already dropped 11% compared to last year and 33% compared to 2017.”
LGBTQ people are not the only ones to be targeted by this type of legislation. One Jewish family was turned away from a foster care agency in Tennessee, and one in South Carolina; a Catholic family was turned away in South Carolina, all because they didn’t share the agency’s beliefs. Yet one more reason we need to pass the federal Every Child Deserves a Family Act and the Equality Act to stop this type of discrimination and increase the chances that more children will find the homes they need.
Moving to the next new law, Arizona’s SB 1138 prohibits providing “irreversible gender reassignment surgery” to minors, except in the cases of intersex people or people with certain disorders, injuries, or illnesses. An earlier version of the bill banned all types of gender transition procedures, which would have included puberty blocking therapies, but this was changed in the final bill that passed and limited to surgeries.
This is not as bad as it could have been, then, but is still awful, and a case of politicians acting contrary to accepted medical standards of care. That’s the key point here. A person’s care should be between them and their medical professional(s), acting within generally accepted standards.
Fact is, too, that even the Standards of Care for children and adolescents from the The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) don’t recommend genital surgery for minors, so making a big deal of banning it like it’s a problem proves that this is political posturing. The Standards do say that chest surgery may in some circumstances be carried out somewhat earlier (although I don’t think that’s at all common), but they stress that this depends on “an adolescent’s specific clinical situation.” In other words, it’s between them and their doctor, a medical professional who understands such clinical situations. Politicians don’t.
The ACLU and the National Center for Lesbian Rights are already planning to sue the state over this law.
The final recent anti-LGBTQ law in Arizona, SB 1165, bans all transgender girls/women in public and private schools and universities from playing sports on girls’/women’s teams.
The leading health, education, and child welfare organizations in the U.S. agree that laws limiting access to best-practice medical care, and preventing trans youth from playing on teams aligned with their genders, exacerbate the risks of depression and self-harm, including suicide. They assert, “Research has shown that when transgender youth have access to gender-affirming services, competent care and affirmation, their risk of depression, anxiety and other negative mental health outcomes is greatly reduced.”
Arizona, Alabama, Florida, and Texas may be getting most of the recent headlines, but anti-LGBTQ bills, especially anti-trans bills, are pending in many states. As I’ve said before, we LGBTQ advocates and our allies need to be coordinated and concerted in our efforts to fight them. None of us have to do everything, but each of us should do something. Please do what you can, whether that means contributing time or money to an organization fighting these bills, contacting your elected officials, or providing support for a young trans person you may know. If you already are doing any of these things, thank you. Together we can stop this onslaught.