A federal judge last week blocked a ban on gender-affirming care for children.

This ruling only applied in Arkansas, but in other red states, we are still seeing a wave of these kinds of restrictions.

Well, transgendered minors in Texas hoping to have gender-affirming care won't be able to get it in about three months.

A priority for some Republicans to limit transgender athletes and restrict gender-related health care for minors past the Missouri Senate today.

As we gal Obama became the third state in the nation to pass a measure restricting gender-affirming care for transgender and non-binary youth.

But it's the first state to actually impose criminal penalties, the law.

And now, we're starting to understand more about the forces behind these laws.

In part because of reporting from our colleague Lauren Weber, who has been looking into a group called the American College of Pediatricians.

This group, it sounds official, but Lauren has found it's actually quite small and pretty fringe.

They're support for conversion therapy, their positions against gender-affirming care.

They even get into things like spanking on their website, they're prospanying, there's a variety of stances that they disagree with the vast majority of medical groups on.

Lauren and others at the post recently accessed a trove of internal documents that show just how influential this group has become.

This group has really grown in influence over the last couple years.

I mean, they're currently one of the plaintiffs on the Miffa Pristone case, which is one of the key drugs for abortion access in the US that's currently winding its way through the courts.

They have helped influence a lot of the pushback against gender-affirming care across the United States.

They've successfully helped strip many folks in many states of their ability to access that care through lobbying, legislatures, sending letters, appearing on Fox News, being used as a resource by right wing media.

And so my colleagues and I thought that with these internal documents, it would be good to get a good overlook of what's happening, what's going on with this group, how are they able to achieve this influence, how has it grown, and what does it mean?

From the newsroom of the Washington Post, this is Post Reports. I'm Ella Hay Izadi. It's Tuesday, June 27.

Today, I talk with Lauren about her reporting on the American College of Pediatricians, and how a small group of conservative doctors have become big time influencers on issues like abortion and trans rights.

The American College of Pediatricians, it sounds so official within the name, but how does it compare to other medical groups?

There's the American Academy of Pediatrics, which sounds very similar, but it's very different. It has 67,000 members, 95% of whom are doctors.

That's in comparison to the American College of Pediatricians, which has about 700 members from what our reporting showed from their internal documents, and roughly 60% of those folks identify as physicians.

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