Amid growing alarm and shocking revelations concerning gender-affirming “care,” Rhode Island just became the latest state to enshrine the controversial practice into law. Yesterday, Governor Daniel McKee signed the “Healthcare Provider Shield Act,” making Rhode Island a safe haven for both abortion and transgender medicine.
Under the new law, access to abortion and gender-affirming care is a legal right in Rhode Island.
We covered the legislation when it was first introduced earlier this year by Senator Dawn Euer and Representative John G. Edwards in twin bills (SB2262/HB7577) here, followed by the Senate judiciary hearings here.
As we wrote then, the “Healthcare Provider Shield Act” insulates Rhode Island doctors and their patients from civil and criminal complaints filed in other states that restrict these surgeries and treatments.
The law sets up a series of protections against such “hostile litigation,” summarized by the State Legislature announcing its passage:
These include protections from arrest and extradition, subpoena for testimony and documents, professional disciplinary action in Rhode Island on the basis of disciplinary action taken against them in other states and wiretapping and other surveillance.
The new Act also prevents all state public agencies, including law enforcement, from cooperating with out-of-state investigations of protected health care in Rhode Island. It protects personal medical information from being shared with law enforcement agencies in other states. It also protects doctors from losing their licenses or medical malpractice insurance coverage over their abortion or transgender care services.
Taken altogether, the Shield Act essentially makes abortion and transgender healthcare providers an untouchable class of defendants when sued from another state.
Supporters of the law say doctors are entitled to that protection. “We need to be able to continue to do our jobs without fear,” testified one of those doctors at the hearings, “and we deserve to be able to provide unrestricted, evidence-based healthcare without fear of legal repercussions.”
But recent developments show it’s the vulnerable patients, not their self-serving doctors, who deserve protection from these barbaric treatments that turn out to be not so evidence-based after all.
The tragic, lifelong consequences of medical transitioning are much more widely known than they were even a year ago.
Stories of “detransitioners”—individuals who were medically transitioned as children and later seek to reverse it—came to light earlier this year when, to the surprise of many, the New York Times published a candid piece on their plight.
There is now growing public awareness that these children were being used as guinea pigs to test out gender-affirming care—a radical “no-questions-asked” model for treating gender dysphoria, recently re-endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). Abandoning the traditional protocol of “watching and waiting,” AAP policy advises doctors to “affirm” a child’s stated desire to change genders by prescribing puberty-blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones, and irreversible surgeries. Far too many of these children come to regret these life-altering treatments. They “detransition”—and sue the doctors they allege caused permanent damage to their health.
In fact, Rhode Island is the legal battleground in two high-stakes detransitioner cases we covered here. [*] The AAP is the defendant in one of those lawsuits, which alleges the medical group knew their gender-affiriming care policy was based on lies and misrepresentations pushed by activist doctors. “The AAP thought trans was the next civil rights crusade and got boondoggled by enthusiastic young doctors,” said one of the longtime AAP members quoted in the complaint. “There was clearly no fact-checking,” he said.
We’ve also learned that these self-interested gender-affirming care doctors have been causing irreversible damage to their pediatric patients knowing full well their treatments are anything but scientific. They rely on ideologically driven guidance from the World Professional Association for Transgender (WPATH)—guidance Rhode Island’s new Act expressly incorporates into its definition of “gender-affirming health care services.”
But earlier this year, leaked files from WPATH revealed that the so-called “medically appropriate evidence-based care” advocated by the Act’s sponsors turns out to be neither.
And just yesterday, news that the Biden administration pressured WPATH to lower the age limits for trans surgeries tore through X/ formerly Twitter:
Even the New York Times covered the story, more proof, some say, that public opinion is turning against performing these sex-change procedures on minors:
Meanwhile, England’s landmark youth gender study, the Cass Review, prompted a return to common sense in the UK. The study confirmed the “remarkably weak” evidence behind gender medicine. The UK has since banned puberty blockers in both public and private clinics to “avoid serious danger to health.” The tide is turning there in the wake of the report.
All these developments should have prompted Rhode Island lawmakers to restrict gender-affirming care, not forge it into law. The world is waking up to what may be the most shameful episode in modern medical history. And Rhode Island just came down on the wrong side of it.
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