Many of the bills denied certain medical care to transgender people, while others targeted bathroom use and preferred personal pronouns.

By Adeel Hassan

Adeel Hassan read through dozens of state laws and spoke with law professors about the implications of the new legislation.

Statehouses around the country this year have been consumed by fights over laws governing transgender people.

Seventeen states during their most recent legislative sessions passed restrictions on medical care for transgender people, joining just three other states that passed similar bans in the last two years. A series of other laws passed regulate which bathrooms transgender people can use and whether schools can affirm transgender children’s identities.

Already many of these laws are being challenged in court, and judges are scrutinizing their precise wording. A federal judge in Arkansas last week struck down that state’s law forbidding medical treatments for children and teenagers seeking gender transitions. Earlier this month, a Florida judge sided with families seeking to block the state’s law banning gender transition care for minors, saying that the ban is likely to be found to be unconstitutional.

Amid the fighting, it’s easy to overlook the text of the laws themselves, which can get clinical very quickly.

So what’s actually in these bills? Here is a closer look at the language.

Many states have banned medical treatments and various surgical procedures for minors.

Laws banning gender-transition care for minors have been enacted in 20 states; Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee and Arizona enacted bans before 2023, though Arkansas’s was recently struck down. Arizona’s law focuses on surgical procedures, but the rest extend the ban to other treatments, including puberty blockers and hormones.

Out of an estimated 1.6 million Americans who are transgender, about 300,000 are under 18. A small number get surgery as part of their transition, but it is much more common for children to transition socially — changing their name, clothing, haircut or other parts of their appearance and identity — and through the use of puberty-delaying medications or hormones.

Often these laws lay out a broad list of procedures. Indiana’s law, for example, includes mastectomies but also mentions procedures like liposuction and hair reconstruction. The legislation specifies that these procedures are banned for minors only if they are for the specific purpose of gender transition.

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