Utah Republicans, ignoring their own study, pass ban on gender-affirming care for youthhttps://www.advocate.com/politics/utah-gender-affirming-care-ban 🔗Ryan Adamczeski (6 Feb 2026)
Utah Republicans have passed three separate bills restricting gender-affirming care for youth, ignoring research they commissioned which concluded the treatment is safe and beneficial.
The state House of Representatives passed H.B. 174 on Thursday in a 54-16 vote, which would ban hormone therapy for those under age 18, requiring doctors of those currently receiving care to stop writing prescriptions by Jan. 28, 2027. It makes permanent the state's 2023 moratorium, which was enacted pending the results of a study by the University of Utah's Drug Regimen Review Center.
The House also passed H.B. 193, which would prevent insurance through state employers from covering gender-affirming care, and H.B. 258, which would require private insurers to cover de-transition treatment.
While Gov. Spencer Cox and other Republicans claimed when enacting the moratorium that gender-affirming care is "experimental" and that they needed more evidence to move forward, their own report — over 1,000 pages in length — found over 230 primary studies involving 28,056 trans youth.
The report unequivocally concluded that gender-affirming care leads to better mental health and lower suicide risk among transgender minors, with researchers noting that the evidence available is "far exceeding" that usually required for high-risk pediatric treatments to receive FDA approval.
