Leading Off: Abortion drugs blocked from being prescribed by mail, the state if Idaho is sued over a bathroom ban, and Illinois seeks to protect women and trans people. The top headlines as we start off the week.
analysis by Evan Urquhart and Valorie Van-Dieman
On Friday a three judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals issued a nationwide injunction requiring the abortion medication mifepristone to be prescribed and dispensed in person, effectively banning access to the drug by mail. In combination with the 2022 ruling overturning Roe v Wade, this decision stands to have a devastating impact nationwide on people’s access to abortion options.
As of Saturday, Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro, two companies which manufacture the drug, have filed emergency appeals to the Supreme Court seeking to pause the lower court’s ruling.
Last week, Billie Jean Sweeney wrote for Assigned Media about the connections between the anti-abortion movement, the anti-trans movement, and other right wing anti-science causes. In light of this, trans people may reasonably wonder whether the tactics here could be applied to transgender people’s hormone therapy.
For now, the answer is: It’s complicated.
Mifepristone has long been a conservative obsession. During Biden’s presidency, the FDA allowed the drug to be sent to patients via mail for the first time, a move that incensed conservatives in the wake of newly legal state bans on abortion after the Dobbs decision. In 2023, a Texas judge briefly attempted to overturn a 20-year FDA precedent and ban it nationally. However, even if the ban on mailing mifepristone stood, mail-prescribed medication abortions would still be available to women in their first trimester with a single-drug regimen.
So, in the short term, preventing the mailing of mifepristone wouldn’t even stop the mailing of drugs for a medication abortion.
The drugs used in transgender hormone therapy have a wide range of uses, and a history of FDA approval that goes back much further than mifepristone. Mail-order doctor services that provide testosterone to cis men have multiplied in recent years, and testosterone is a much more highly regulated drug than estrogen. Interfering with their remote prescription would have extensive knock-on effects for the many more cisgender people who use these drugs, making an attempt to stop their prescription by mail in the court far more politically risky.
Still, the increasing appetite of conservative judges for deciding cases in whatever way is the most politically convenient is a worsening problem, and gambits to restrict trans people’s healthcare have often advanced hand in hand with abortion restrictions and ahead of other anti-science measures aimed at vaccines or other, more popular, medical treatments. While restricting hormones-by-mail would be much messier and more difficult than restricting mifepristone, it’s difficult to call anything truly impossible.
In response to the harsh bathroom ban enacted by the state of Idaho, six transgender Idahoans are suing the state, arguing that the law is unconstitutional. The penalties for the ban are some of the harshest in the nation, with a possible penalty of a year in jail for a first offence for a trans person who knowingly uses a restroom different from their birth-assigned sex.
In addition to the extreme penalties, the law also applies to bathrooms in private businesses, not just in government buildings as most laws of this kind do. This added restriction, the plaintiffs argue, would add undue burden to them both in their personal lives and their professional ones, with several of them noting their own places of employment would not have facilities appropriate for them to use, which would require them to restrict their food and water consumption just so that they can work.
Diego Fable, one of the plaintiffs, said in a statement, “The only safe option truly available is to just stay home, or leave the state entirely.”
In Illinois, a bill seeking to protect trans people and abortion patients has passed a senate committee, allowing it to move forward for a full vote. The bill, SB 4834, seeks to remove testosterone, estrogen, GnRH analogues, mifepristone, and misoprostol from the state’s Prescription Monitoring Program, a program which tracks certain prescriptions in order to prevent abuses to the system in the cases of controlled substances.
In addition to the removal of these prescriptions from tracking, the bill also seeks to purge all records of testosterone prescriptions, with proponents of the bill arguing that a database containing this information leaves trans people in danger of government tracking and targeting.
If voted into law, the bill would take effect immediately, with the data purge being required to be done by January 1st 2027.
Evan Urquhart is the founder of Assigned Media. Follow him on Bluesky @evanurquhart.bsky.social
Valorie Van-Dieman (they/she) is an Associate Editor at Assigned Media. On Bluesky @valorievandieman.bsky.social
