An executive order designed to protect people providing and receiving gender-affirming care was signed by New York City mayor Eric Adams on Monday.
Executive Order 32, signed in celebration of Pride, prevents the use of city resources to investigate, detain or prosecute anyone providing or receiving care.
It’s a measure similar to one cities have taken to try to protect abortion rights after the reversal of Roe v Wade.
New York as a state has not passed any restrictions on gender-affirming care for minors, which remains legal across the Northeast.
But Mr Adams’s measure comes at a time when the transgender community has been under a sustained attack from Republican party officials who have introduced more than 400 bills in state legislatures targeting LGBT+ people so far this year. Twenty states have already passed laws limiting or banning gender-affirming care for minors, with more states actively considering bans.
“As states across the nation continue their onslaught of attacks on our LGBT+ neighbors, New York City is doing what we have always done — standing up for justice and against discrimination,” Mr Adams said in a statement on the executive action.
“This executive order reaffirms the fact that hate has no place in our city and that all people deserve the right to gender-affirming care and protection against prosecution for being who they are.”
The spirit of Mr Adams’s order is aligned with advisories from a number of major medical associations like the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, which have said that gender-affirming care is safe and can be lifesaving.
The number of people who transition and express regret about it later is believed to be at or less than one percent. For some of them, the regret was temporary.
Some see attacks on gender-affirming care for children as part of a broader assault on the bodily autonomy of people who are not cisgender men.
A number of the states that have passed bans on gender-affirming care have also passed limits or effective bans on abortion care. Some people in such states have been forced to move to other areas without such restrictions.
New York is a place of particular import for the LGBT+ movement, as it is the site of the Stonewall riot and one of the country’s largest and most visible LGBT+ communities.
It’s annual Pride parade is set to take place on 25 June.
