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This is Lindsay Smith Rogers. Today, Stephanie Desmond talks to Dr. Helene Heedian, a primary care physician and director of clinical education at the Johns Hopkins Center for Transgender and Gender Expansive Health, about what feels like a legislative assault on transgender rights in the U.S.

and the importance of gender affirming care for mental and physical health. Let's listen.

Helene Heedian, thanks so much for joining me.

Thank you. I'm happy to be here. Today I wanted to talk to you about really being seen as an assault on transgender rights. A Washington Post analysis found that since the beginning of the year,

more bills targeting LGBTQ plus

rights, particularly transgender rights, have been introduced and become law than any other time

in U.S. history. Does that ring true to you? It does, unfortunately. It's a reality that I talk

with my patients about every day when I see them in clinic.

It's felt very heavily by members of the LGBTQ community because many of them don't have the luxury of tuning out politics when it directly impacts their lives, their families, and their livelihoods and their health.

So what do these mean?

First of all, could you tell us a little bit

at what kind of laws we're seeing? It's a wide range of legislative attempts to restrict the

freedoms and health care access of LGBTQ people. In some cases, laws are targeting health care

for minors, particularly for trans and gender diverse minors. In other cases, laws are targeting health care for minors, particularly for trans and gender-diverse minors.

In other cases, they target the right of trans people simply to exist safely in public spaces.

I have a patient who's from out of state who had to tell her family recently that she can't go back and visit safely

because that state has passed a law which means that if she were to get pulled over for like a

routine traffic stop she could be arrested because the sex on her ID doesn't match sex on

...