In 2023, Utah passed a ban on gender affirming care for minors. One condition of the ban was a thorough scientific study on the health outcomes of such treatment. Now the report has been released, finding long-established evidence for the life saving nature of gender-affirming care, and the Utah Republicans who commissioned the report are silent.
Utah’s gender affirming care ban prohibits gender affirming surgeries and treatments such as hormone therapy and puberty blockers for patients under the age of 18 (unless they were prescribed those medications before the law took effect). Doctors found in violation of the law can have their licenses suspended and face criminal charges.
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Republican Rep Mike Kennedy, who sponsored the bill, is both a physician and a lawyer, and he claimed there was not enough research on gender affirming care, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. As a result, the bill was pitched as a moratorium, a temporary pause to allow for formal study on the health effects. He also claimed that his sole concern was the wellbeing of children and that “compassion and love are at the base of all of this.”
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Now two and a half years after Republicans commissioned additional research, the data is finally here (as of Monday). The 1,000-page report conducted by University of Utah’s Drug Regimen Review Center examined over 230 studies involving more than 28,000 transgender youth, and the results confirm what doctors and the trans community already knew.
“The conventional wisdom among non-experts has long been that there are limited data on the use of [gender-affirming hormone therapy] in pediatric patients,” the study reads, referencing the Utah legislature’s entire basis for commissioning the report. “However, results from our exhaustive literature searches have led us to the opposite conclusion.”
“The body of evidence we have uncovered exceeds the amount of evidence that often serves as the basis of FDA approval for many high-risk, new drugs approved in pediatric populations in the US,” the researchers added. While many gender affirming medications are not FDA-approved for that specific purpose, the study notes that off-label use is common for pediatric medicine. This is because drug manufacturers are not incentivized to seek multiple FDA approvals for every niche use-case.
Not only is there extensive research that gender affirming care is safe, but researchers found evidence that it is effective as well. Researchers found that trans youth who underwent care experienced drastic mental health outcomes, such as reduced suicide risk.
The report also debunked a number of common talking points among Republicans, noting that transition-related surgeries are not usually recommended for minors and that regret (based on 32 specific studies) is “virtually nonexistent.”
So far, Utah Republicans are mostly silent on the new study, including the bill’s sponsor (who declined to comment). Republican Reps Katy Hall and Bridger Bolinder, however, both jumped to deny the report’s findings. “The science isn’t there,” they said in a joint statement. “The risks are real, and the public is with us. We intend to keep the moratorium in place.”
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