Utah‘s ban on gender-affirming care for transgender youth was meant to be a moratorium, giving lawmakers the chance to reevaluate the policy once experts reviewed research on the impacts of treatment.
This week, nearly 2½ years after the law took effect, lawmakers received the findings of that study.
Utah health care experts concluded, in a more than 1,000-page report, “Overall, there were positive mental health and psychosocial functioning outcomes” as a result of gender-affirming care. But some Republican legislators are already dismissing those findings.
“Young kids and teenagers should not be making life-altering medical decisions based on weak evidence,” Rep. Katy Hall, R-South Ogden, the House sponsor of the 2023 ban, and Rep. Bridger Bolinder, R-Grantsville, who chairs the Legislature’s Health and Human Services Interim Committee, said in a joint statement to The Salt Lake Tribune.
“Utah was right to lead on this issue,” they continued, “and the public agrees — polls show clear majority support both statewide and nationally. Simply put, the science isn’t there, the risks are real, and the public is with us. We intend to keep the moratorium in place.”
While the review prepared for lawmakers acknowledged “an increase in some specific types of benign brain tumors,” it found in studies that included thousands of transgender individuals that “increase risk of mortality was consistently due to increase in suicide, non-natural causes, and HIV/AIDS. Patients that were seen at the gender clinic before the age of 18 had a lower risk of suicide compared to those referred as an adult.”
Utah Senate President Stuart Adams told The Tribune that “the future and safety of kids are paramount.”
“That is why Utah enacted a law to safeguard the long-term health and well-being of minors while providing time to carefully examine the evolving medical landscape surrounding novel and irreversible procedures for minors,” he said in a statement. “I appreciate the Utah Department of Health and Human Services for evaluating the available evidence. We will review the report as part of our ongoing commitment to the well-being of Utah’s children.
As of Wednesday afternoon, Gov. Spencer Cox was mum on the report, which conflicts with a review issued by the Trump administration earlier this month. A spokesperson for the governor did not respond to requests for comment on the Utah study.
In a committee meeting overseen by Bolinder earlier Wednesday, the only mention of the report and subsequent recommendations came at the beginning when a staffer said dozens of reports legally required to be submitted to the body had been posted online. There was no discussion of the documents’ contents.
Minority leaders Rep. Angela Romero and Sen. Luz Escamilla said their respective caucuses had not been notified of the report’s release. They said lawmakers should take more time to review the report’s contents before definitively deciding the future of the policy, and that the public should be included in those discussions.
The newest member of Utah‘s congressional delegation, Rep. Mike Kennedy, sponsored the 2023 bill banning gender-affirming care for transgender youth. Kennedy, a physician and attorney, insisted then that he was motivated by concern for children’s health, telling his colleagues, “compassion and love are at the base of all of this” and that lawmakers needed more evidence before they allowed minors to continue accessing gender-affirming treatments.
The congressman’s office has also not yet responded to an inquiry regarding his response to the report.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Rep. Katy Hall, R-South Ogden, at the Utah Capitol in Salt Lake City on Thursday, March 6, 2025.
Health officials decline to take a position
Utah‘s gender-affirming care ban was debated, passed, signed by the governor and took effect within days of the 2023 legislative session’s commencement.
The law bars gender transition-related surgeries for people under 18 years old, and also prohibits minors from accessing hormone therapy, including puberty blockers, in the state. Young people who had already been diagnosed with gender dysphoria before January 2023 were allowed to continue previously prescribed hormone treatments.
Doctors who provide care and violate the ban could lose their licenses and face criminal charges under the law.
Utah‘s chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Center for Lesbian Rights stated publicly in 2023 that they planned to sue over the restrictions, but no such suit has been filed. Shannon Minter, the NCLR legal director, previously said in a statement to The Tribune that he anticipated a challenge to come along later in Utah than in other states because of the portion of Utah‘s law that allowed some youth to continue receiving care.
The report, released Monday, was compiled by the Drug Regimen Review Center at the University of Utah and is dated August 2024.
Utah‘s Department of Health and Human Services worked with a team of advisers — including doctors at the agency, University of Utah Health, Intermountain Health, Roseman University of Health Sciences and multiple specialty physician licensing boards — after the review’s completion to give recommendations posted with the full report as to how the Legislature might move forward.
“The Utah Department of Health and Human Services does not take a position on whether to lift the moratorium,” that document for lawmakers, dated this month, reads.
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Protesters on the steps of the Capitol, in support of transgender youth, on Thursday, March 24, 2022.
If the Legislature does decide to end the ban, however, DHHS recommended it also create a “hormonal transgender treatment board” that would provide care guidelines; limit providers delivering care to “demonstrated experts” and require that treatment be overseen by an interdisciplinary team of physicians and mental health professionals; and implement an “explicit informed consent” process.
The department wrote that it took over nine months after receiving the report to draft suggestions for the Legislature because “there were some barriers in recruiting all of the required advisors.” The recommendations were initially due in November and was marked on the Legislature’s website as “overdue.”
Last June, conservative groups the Manhattan Institute and Do No Harm, — which aims to “counteract divisive trends in medicine, such as ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’ and youth-focused gender ideology,” according to its website — joined state officials to discuss another report, the widely criticized “Cass Review,” at a Health and Human Services Interim Committee meeting chaired by Kennedy.
According to DHHS, the Drug Regimen Review Center analyzed that report — commissioned from a retired British pediatrician by National Health Service England, and relied on to restrict gender-affirming care for transgender youth in the U.K. — too, before reaching its conclusions.
Utah‘s report also follows one by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, published earlier this month to comply with an executive order from President Donald Trump, which also began the process of implementing nationwide restrictions on gender-affirming care. Some of the measures in the order have been blocked and remain tangled up in court.
The federal report departed from guidelines widely used by health care providers and the opinions of most medical associations, including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, in asserting that there are significant risks to gender transition. It instead encouraged psychotherapy for transgender youth, including methods considered by some mental health providers to be conversion therapy — a practice banned in Utah.
Hormonal treatments for gender transition have not been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat gender dysphoria. But, Utah‘s DHHS noted in its legislative report, “administering [the medication] off-label has become the standard of care.”
Off-label use refers to the practice of administering drugs that are approved to be prescribed in the U.S., but to treat conditions for which the medication is not expressly approved. Such use of drugs is legal and common, particularly among children, Utah DHHS noted, because there are few incentives for pharmaceutical companies to invest in seeking further approvals once their products are OK‘d for adults.
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Rep. Mike Kennedy speaks during the State Organizing Convention for the Utah Republican Party at Utah Valley University in Orem on Saturday, May 17, 2025.
Utah‘s transgender kids face elevated risks
This week‘s release of the report follows University of Utah Health‘s decision to shutter its popular clinic for LGBTQ+ youth, a move a spokesperson attributed to a reduction in patients following the 2023 passage of Utah‘s gender-affirming care ban.
Improved mental health outcomes are often the focus of offering hormone treatments to transgender young people. Research included in the Drug Regimen Review Center’s review for Utah officials indicated transgender individuals who receive care at a gender clinic before the age of 18 are less likely to commit suicide — a risk transgender people of all demographics are disproportionately prone to.
As part of Utah‘s Student Health and Risk Prevention survey in 2023, approximately a quarter of transgender students polled reported attempting suicide at some point during the previous year, and 61% said they had seriously considered it, compared to 18% of their peers.
The Trump administration pulled such mental health data related to transgender youth offline earlier this year before being ordered by a federal judge to restore it.
Utah‘s DHHS also took transgender-specific reports down around the same time. The agency said the action was due to privacy concerns, and told The Tribune it “had no ill intent or political motivation.”
An article by researchers at The Trevor Project — an LGBTQ+ youth suicide prevention nonprofit — published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour last year concluded that among transgender youth, suicide attempts have ticked up in states that have passed laws restricting transgender people’s ability to live openly.
