The Medford City Council Public Health and Community Safety Committee is reviewing an ordinance “securing the rights of individuals seeking gender-affirming care” in the city.
The committee discussed the ordinance draft during a Feb. 4 meeting, voting to keep the draft in committee considering the lack of urgency on the state level and until it can undergo legal review. The legal review for the draft will be done by KP Law and will be completed later in the week.
The draft of the ordinance is four pages long and outlines a plan to protect gender-affirming healthcare and reproductive healthcare.
The ordinance defines gender-affirming care as “all supplies, care, and services of medical, behavioral health, mental health, surgical, psychiatric, therapeutic, diagnostic, preventative, rehabilitative, or supportive nature relating to the treatment of gender dysphoria.”
This drafted ordinance establishes Medford as a sanctuary for people seeking gender-affirming care, ensuring the city’s police department is only responsible for enforcing state and municipal ordinances.
According to City Councilor Emily Lazzaro, the concern around gender-affirming care that inspired this ordinance began after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Medford’s proposed resolution was inspired by a similar one in Easthampton, Mass.
“Easthampton had an ordinance that [was] just short of legal rights for people who were doing gender-affirming care and people who were doing reproductive healthcare, and may have been traveling to get reproductive healthcare and didn’t want to be prosecuted by other states,” Lazzaro said.
City Councilor and Harvard Law student Justin Tseng, who introduced the ordinance alongside City Councillor Kit Collins, also took inspiration from conversations with Medford residents.
“I was talking to a lot of residents who felt very similarly about the importance to stick up for people to make sure that diversity means diversity, that equity means equity, to not run away from DEI and to really embrace it in how our city operates and our policies,” Tseng said.
Advocacy groups such as People Power reached out to councilors to press the importance of the issue, Lazzaro said.
“We didn’t have a chance to finish this one. So this is something that we were reminded of, and we wanted to take it up after.” Lazzaro said. “So it started in review, and then it was even more important after Trump’s election.”
For Tseng, the question was how to introduce “meaningful and impactful” legislation in a state which has enshrined many protections for LGBTQ+ individuals.
“The question then becomes, what can we do that … responds to the concerns that people are feeling, the anxieties that people are feeling on the ground, and yet still be meaningful and have force,” he said.
Part of that means refusing to comply with other states’ laws which criminalize people’s efforts to seek gender-affirming care. According to the draft, “the City of Medford should not participate in the enforcement of another state’s civil or criminal law when that law seeks to deny an individual’s right to bodily autonomy.”
“It’s illegal to travel from Texas to get an abortion in Massachusetts,” Lazzaro said, speaking about a hypothetical scenario in which Medford passed the ordinance. “But Medford says, ‘We, Medford, will not participate in enforcing Texas’ laws.’”
As part of the drafting process, Tseng reached out to healthcare workers at Atrius Health and Harvard Vanguard to discuss what the ordinance should look like.
Lazzaro led the meeting discussing the drafting of this resolution. She remarked that the council contacted the chief of police about the enforcement, or lack thereof in this case, for this ordinance.
Providing people with the opportunity to seek care without criminal or civil action being taken against them, Lazzaro said, is a “subtle resistance to a law that we feel is unjust.”
“It is contrary to the City of Medford’s public policy to criminalize a person’s efforts to live as their full, authentic self, and thus the City’s resources should not be expended toward that end,” according to the draft.
Lazzaro highlighted the role that the Medford Police Department plays in the Medford community.
“That’s all we’re saying as a municipality, and we’re allowed to say that for our police department,” Lazzaro said. “Medford Police Department doesn’t work for Massachusetts. They work for Medford. They work for the mayor, and the city council writes the laws that the mayor enforces. So that’s where we feel like we have at least a little bit of power.”
