adding-left: 40px”>Arkansas has become the first US state to outlaw gender confirming treatments and surgery for transgender people under the age of 18.
The bill also in effect bans doctors from providing puberty blockers, or from referring them to other providers for the treatment.
The Republican state governor had vetoed the bill, calling it a "vast government overreach".
But the state's Republican-controlled House and Senate overruled him.
The bill has faced much opposition from groups including the American Academy of Pediatrics, which said the law would block trans youth from important medical care and increase their already high risk of suicide.
An old canard that's regularly trotted out, that suicide line – deeply irresponsible, and without evidence.
Supporters of the bill, who are almost all Republican, say they want to protect children from life-changing procedures they will later regret. They also point to side-effects of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, and cite occasional cases where transgender people reverse their decision to transition.
But experts say each step is undertaken with the consultation of doctors, therapists and social workers, often over extended periods of time.
Ha. Ask Keira Bell.
The Beeb's Washington correspondent Shrai Popat adds more on the same lines:
Over the past few weeks Arkansas has played a game of legislative ping-pong, with gender-affirming care hanging in the balance. Now, the state has become the first to prohibit physicians from providing gender-affirming healthcare to trans youth. Medical experts have said this will likely have disastrous consequences for trans youth, particularly when it comes to mental health.
Dr Jack Turban, a fellow in child and adolescent psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine, told the BBC that access to gender-affirming care for trans youth is "consistently linked to better mental health outcomes".
He added that much of the political discourse around this care has been shrouded in unscientific misinformation that implies "transgender youth are 'confused' or invalid."
That would be the same Jack Turban who recently wrote a piece for the Scientific American claiming that there's no scientific reason for excluding trans women – ie men – from women's sport. And the same Jack Turban who's reputedly taken at least $15,000 from a pharmaceutical company that makes puberty blockers.
As a paid-up member of Stonewall UK's Diversity Champions scheme, the BBC is no doubt guided on its trans reporting with the same diligence that the ACLU and its leading ideologue Chase Strangio guides CNN.
And now we hear that trans activists, including Chelsea Manning (remember him?), are actively encouraging the smuggling of puberty blockers and other such chemicals into Arkansas.
There's just no end to the fun.
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