*Content warning: This article includes facts on suicide.
In this blog, we’re talking about gender-affirming care for transgender youth: defining what it actually is, combatting disinformation, breaking down the efforts to ban and restrict it, and more. Get the facts here, and join us in fighting for Texas’ transgender community!
Let’s start with the basics. What exactly is gender-affirming care?
Gender-affirming care encompasses a wide range of medical health care, mental health care, and social services that can be provided to people who experience gender dysphoria — distress that results from one’s gender identity not matching one’s body/sex assigned at birth.
Gender-affirming care includes both medical and non-medical interventions like therapy, and social affirmation like using someone’s chosen name and pronouns. For this piece, we’re focusing mainly on medical care.
For young people under 18, gender-affirming care is given by doctors, with parents’ or guardians’ permission, in age-appropriate ways. Examples of gender-affirming medical care that can be given to minors include:
- Puberty blockers: A type of FDA-approved medication that can temporarily pause puberty and is fully reversible.
- Hormone therapy: Much more rarely given to minors than puberty blockers, hormone therapy involves giving someone estrogen or testosterone. This typically isn’t available until a patient turns 16, and again, only with parent or guardian permission.
Gender-affirming care for minors IS:
- Life-saving: Transgender and gender nonbinary young people are at much higher risk of mental health crises, substance use, and self-induced harm than other kids. When they have access to care like hormone therapy and puberty blockers, they report less psychological distress and thoughts of suicide, and other positive short- and long-term effects. Whether or not someone understands the medical necessity of affirming care, surely all Texans can understand the need to save a life.
- Widely accepted, safe, evidence-based, and supported by all major health organizations: Every major U.S. medical and mental health organization, from the American Medical Association to the American Psychiatric Association to the American Academy of Pediatrics, supports and has set best-practice standards for gender-affirming care for transgender young people.
Gender-affirming care for minors IS NOT:
- Surgery, except in extremely rare instances: Even though fear-mongering legislators want you to think doctors are performing surgeries on kids left and right, it just isn’t true. Transgender people cannot have gender-affirming genital surgeries until they’re adults, full stop. In rare instances, 16- and 17-year-olds have received top surgeries (the removal of breast tissue), only with approval from their parents and doctors after taking gender-affirming hormones for some time.
By the way, we’ve been allowing gender-affirming surgeries and hormone therapy for cisgender people — babies, even! — for decades, without scrutiny or demonization. And, adversely, doctors have been performing so-called “normalizing” surgeries on the genitals of intersex babies that are medically unnecessary, irreversible, non-consensual, and often catastrophically harmful.
Make. It. Make. Sense.
What’s the status of gender-affirming care for minors in Texas?
In June 2023 — despite massive public resistance — Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed Senate Bill 14 into law, banning healthcare for transgender youth, including puberty blockers and hormone therapy. The law went into effect Sept. 1, 2023.
This cruel and aggressive ban withholds treatments like puberty blockers and hormone therapy from our community’s youth that every major medical association identifies as lifesaving. It even callously mandates that young patients cease treatment already begun under the guidance and care of their trusted medical providers.
In June 2024, Texas’ all-Republican Supreme Court upheld the gender-affirming care ban in an 8-1 decision.
Texas is the largest of 25 states that have adopted laws banning or restricting this kind of healthcare. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case on Tennessee’s gender-affirming care ban in the fall.
Why is the far-right so obsessed with hurting transgender kids?
Good question. The way we see it, there are two possible types of people here: people who are scared and are trying to control and erase a group of people that they clearly don’t understand, and, even more insidious, people who understand but just don’t care — who are willfully ignoring the truth in favor of hate-peddling for their own political gain. This NYT article dives into some of the reasons the far-right has latched onto attacking transgender rights.
If you’re thinking, “That’s pretty messed up,” we have opportunities for you to get involved.
Transgender Texans deserve to live full, happy lives with access to the care they need. Transgender children, and their families who support them, shouldn’t have to live in fear. This is what we’re fighting for. Get involved!
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