New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill signed a bill Thursday that offers greater protections for reproductive and gender-affirming healthcare — both for patients and for providers in the state — by making it a crime to intervene against such care.

The new law strengthens existing reproductive healthcare protections and also broadens them to now include gender-affirming care. It’s meant to cover residents as well as people traveling to the state.

“This is a very big deal. It’s amazing,” said Martha Madrigal, a transgender woman who leads the Collingswood chapter of PFLAG, a national advocacy group for the families of LGBTQ+ people.

She added that the law is a “solid declaration” that interfering with transgender rights, “does not stand in New Jersey. We’re letting out an enormous sigh of relief today.”

The legislation expands New Jersey’s shield laws by expressly including gender-affirming care in the definition of “protected reproductive healthcare services.”

Essentially, the law creates a new crime for interfering with someone trying to access reproductive healthcare, such as an abortion, or gender-affirming care.

It’s now a fourth-degree crime (a low-level felony like shoplifting, punishable by up to 18 months in prison) to injure, threaten, intimidate, or physically block patients or providers, or to damage property in an effort to interfere with such care.

The law would also protect providers from extradition to other states that have banned abortion or gender-affirming care for minors.

Sherrill said New Jersey is “standing firm in defense of reproductive freedoms — including the right to choose and the right to receive gender-affirming care.”

In comments after the signing, Sherrill referenced “attacks” and efforts to impose restrictions on access to abortion and gender-affirming healthcare by the Trump administration and Republican-led states.

She said the transgender community has been “relentlessly attacked” by the Trump administration.

“They’ve pulled tactics straight out of the Red Scare playbook to restrict transgender people’s healthcare,” Sherrill contended.

Since returning to office last year, President Donald Trump has issued orders to block federal funding for gender-affirming care for people under 19, oust transgender military personnel and prevent transgender people from using the gender they self-identify as on passports.

“We are not going to pay for our innocent children to undergo these barbaric surgeries and practices, which result in unthinkable and irreversible harm to their young bodies,” Trump said on Truth Social earlier this month after Medicaid ended reimbursement for hormone treatment and surgeries for minors.

Surgeries for minors is extremely rare. And fewer than 1 in 1,000 U.S. adolescents receive medication for gender-affirming care, according to a Harvard University study released last year.

State Sen. Teresa Ruiz, D.-Essex, a chief sponsor of the bill and the Senate’s majority leader, said the bill makes New Jersey “a beacon of hope” in the nation.

“You can’t tell us what we can read on a library shelf but want to be up in our uterus in an exam room,” she said.

The law empowers patients and providers to take legal action against individuals who interfere with their access to or delivery of protected care.

And it protects healthcare providers from professional penalties or adverse actions involving their medical malpractice insurance for providing care that is legal in New Jersey.

Speaking for healthcare providers in New Jersey, Kristyn Brandi and Catherine Obando, doctors from Union who are preparing to open a clinic providing abortions and gender-affirming care, praised the law as an assurance that providers could deliver care without “risking their freedom or professional license” in the state.

“We are grateful to know that our patients and staff will be protected from criminalization and harassment,” Brandi and Obando said in a statement as founders of the Luminosas Wellness Collective.

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