Dylan Brandt reflects on the times before he began receiving gender affirming care. He remembers feeling stuck and struggling with anxiety.
Brandt started hormone therapy right around his 15th Birthday. Brandt says that the treatment saved his life.
Brandt, 17, says that hormones changed her body and my mind. I felt happier because I looked better. I felt free. I felt happy.”
Today, Brandt’s joy is overshadowed today by the fear that his access may soon be cut off because of a 2021 Arkansas law that prohibits gender-affirming treatment for transgenderyouth. Brandt is currently a part of an ACLU lawsuit to repeal the ban. He says that if it is upheld, his family and he would have to leave the country.
Brandt says, “We couldn’t have any other option because this isn’t something that I can live without.”
The Arkansas ban is one of many new state laws that have begun to fundamentally reshape the lives of trans youth throughout the country. It includes restrictions on everything, from how they are treated at school to their health care.
NPR’s analysis of the rapidly changing landscape revealed that state legislators have introduced more trans-related bills in the last two years than any other period. The majority (86%) of this legislation focuses on trans youth.
Although not all proposals have been successful — only 15% of them became law — the increase in legislative activity is a reflection of what many advocates consider an increasingly hostile environment to LGBTQ rights in statehouses across America and certain corners of Congress.
The courts have temporarily blocked some of the new laws. According to Katie Eyer (Rutgers Law School professor), legal challenges have not slowed the pace of new legislation. She says it’s a reminiscence of Brown v. Board of Education when segregation was abolished by the U.S. Supreme Court, but many states tried to block the ruling with laws.
Eyer says that the phenomenon of states “just… churning down legislation as it’s passed down” is a well-known one in civil rights. It can really hinder people’s ability to experience the constitutional rights they have been granted by the courts.
Advocates for trans youth fear that this phenomenon will have devastating consequences. The Trevor Project, a non-profit organization providing crisis support to the LGBTQ community, conducted a January poll and found that 85% said that these laws had negatively affected their mental health. The next poll showed that more than half the trans and nonbinary youth had “seriously considered suicide” in the last year.
Sam Ames, director for advocacy at the Trevor Project, says that regardless of whether these bills are passed, it is already having an adverse impact on LGBTQ youth in general. Ames states that “we are talking to life and death” for many.
More than half of the states have tried to limit gender-affirming healthcare
Some trans youth have found it difficult to get gender-affirming healthcare care due to the new restrictions. Others find it almost impossible.
Alabama, Arkansas and Arizona, as well as Tennessee, have passed legislation banning access to gender-affirming healthcare. At least 20 other states have attempted it.
Many of these proposals sought to ban anyone younger than 18 years old from receiving care that includes hormone replacement therapy, transition-related surgery, and puberty blockers. Some of these states now threaten to jail health care professionals who provide gender-affirming services.
Executive order, regulation or legislation can also be used to impose restrictions. The Texas governor. Greg Abbott ordered the state’s child welfare office to investigate parents and providers of care who provide gender-affirming services to trans youth. This was to be referred to as child abuse. This order is still being challenged in court. The Florida State Medical Board had earlier banned doctors from providing gender-affirming medical care to patients younger than 18.
The impact has been severe. The overall impact has been dramatic. An estimated 300,000. American teenagers aged 13-17 identify themselves as transgender. A March study by Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law found that at least 53.800 were at high risk of losing their gender-affirming medical treatment.
Many of these proposed laws were passed despite misinformation being spread about gender-affirming care. Advocates for trans rights claim that some bills seek to prohibit procedures that are not often available to young patients. A Tennessee law, for example, prohibits health care providers from offering hormone treatments to prepubescent children, even though the World Professional Association for Transgender Health only suggests treatment after a minor enters puberty.
Alex Petrovnia (president of Trans Formations Project), an advocacy group, says that one of the most concerning trends is that these bills are becoming more extreme. “Frankly speaking, I believe that the ultimate goal is to ban transaffirming medical care, period… which should alarm people more than it does, because access to gender affirming care is fundamentally an issue affecting bodily autonomy.
Schools are the frontline for anti-translation legislation
It’s not new for legislation to target the trans community. A “bathroom bill” in North Carolina, which sought to prohibit transgender people from using public toilets where they don’t match their gender on birth certificates, sparked national outrage in 2016. The state would eventually reverse its course after the backlash.
The environment has drastically changed six years later. The bathroom bills are back and they are targeting school locker rooms and school restrooms. At least nine states have taken steps to prohibit trans students from using bathrooms that do not correspond to their birth sex. Alabama, Oklahoma, and Tennessee are the only ones that have succeeded. This latest crop of legislation, however, has passed through state legislatures without much controversy.
Trans students are the focus of the bill. This highlights the extent to schooling has been used as a frontline for trans rights restrictions. Some 63% of the more than 126 bills that have been introduced in 2022 focus on education.
These bills would prohibit transgender students from participating in male sports. These bills are largely inspired by Idaho, which banned transgender girls and women from kindergarten through college from participating in teams that were not in line with their gender identity in 2020. 18 other states have adopted similar laws to Idaho’s.
These bills’ supporters, such as Scott Cepicky, a Republican state Representative from Tennessee, claim that their efforts are more about fairness in competition and less about gender identity. Cepicky introduced legislation earlier this year that states student-athletes cannot compete in sports under the gender assigned to them at birth. Governor Lee signed the bill. In May, Bill Lee signed the bill.
Cepicky states that the bill’s premise was to distinguish politics from sports, as competition is the main focus of the bill. It’s about everyone having equal opportunities to compete on the athletic fields. We want to ensure that males are competing against females, and females against males on athletic fields in order for the competition to be balanced and the scholarships and awards available to be awarded.
Critics see a solution to a problem. They point to a 2021 investigation of The Associated Press which found that the majority of Republican sponsors of bills to ban transgender girls competing in girls’ sports were unable to cite a single instance from their state or region in which such a ban was a problem.
A growing number of states are also enforcing parental disclosure laws. These laws require that educators seek parental permission before teaching students topics such as gender identity and sexuality. Some say that school employees can not withhold information from students who identify as trans if they are aware of it. They can also encourage the student to keep the information.
Other legislation, like Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law, bans discussion of gender identity or sexual orientation in a manner that is not “age-appropriate” or “developmentally-appropriate.” In the time since the bill was signed into law by the state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, similar measures have passed in Alabama and Arizona.
Trans youth are not restricted by new laws
Republican legislators have embraced the anti-trans restrictions almost exclusively. This is a reflection on how trans rights has become a powerful issue for many in the base party.
These bills were sponsored by lawmakers who believe they are necessary to protect parents’ rights in raising their children or uphold religious beliefs.
Jay Richards, the director of the DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, says that parents need to be aware of what is happening at school. “Parents have the primary responsibility to educate their children. While they may delegate this to schools, they do not give up their rights.
Richards says that he doesn’t believe “children can consent to” such medical decisions, like gender-affirming care.
Defenders also point out a few European countries, including England and Finland that have taken steps in recent months in order to restrict gender-affirming care for children. These restrictions, though more permissive than some in the U.S., were driven by questions about screening and support levels for large numbers of patients. They also raise concerns about long-term health effects of the use of puberty-blockers to treat children suffering from “precocious” puberty.
Numerous medical organizations, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society and the American Medical Association, support age-appropriate, gender-affirming care. They also publish their own guidelines. Although there is limited research on the long-term effects, many medical organizations, including the a href=”https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/142/4/e20182162/37381/Ensuring-Comprehensive-Care/support for” rel=”noopener” target=”_blank>Endocrine Society, the a href=”https://www.ama.org/file%20Library/Policies/Pos/Transgender-Diverse.pdf” rel=”noopener”>American Psychia>American Psychia>, have published their own guidelines.
According to advocates and lawmakers, some bills have received a boost from conservative advocacy groups such as the Heritage Foundation or Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) in certain cases. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, ADF is an anti-LGBTQ hate organization. The group was involved in Idaho’s ban on trans girls and women in sports. It disputes this designation by stating that it supports conservative causes in legal cases.
Many of these legislative proposals go beyond trans youth and target the trans community in a more general way. Many states, including Arkansas and Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota. Missouri. Oklahoma, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Tennessee, have tried to restrict access to public toilets in the last two years with mixed results.
Montana and Idaho have attempted to limit the ability of residents to change the sex on their birth certificates. Oklahoma recently passed a law prohibiting gender markers other than male and female on birth certificates.
Others states have passed laws, such as Montana and Mississippi, that make it easier for people to discriminate based on their gender identity or sexual orientation. The laws are necessary to protect religious freedom, according to supporters.
State capitols have not been the only place where efforts to limit trans rights are being made. Some Republican legislators in Congress have failed to pass legislation restricting the access to gender-affirming child care, and discussing gender identity in school curriculum, as well as access to school sports for trans teens.
Advocates for trans rights struggle to keep up.
Advocates for LGBTQ rights struggle to keep up with the influx of new restrictions.
June saw President Biden sign an executive order that aims to increase access to gender-affirming healthcare and to find ways to counter state attempts to limit such care for youth. While states such as Connecticut and California have made efforts to be safe havens to youth who are seeking gender-affirming treatment, the larger push to pass nondiscrimination laws based on gender identity has not had much success.
Ames, from the Trevor Project, says that “it’s difficult to be passing proactive legislation because it is such a hot topic all of a sudden.”
According to the Pew Research Center, less than half all states ban discrimination in housing and employment on the basis gender identity or sexual orientation. According to Pew, these protections are supported by 64% of Americans.
Logan Casey, a senior policy analyst and adviser at Movement Advancement Project (a Colorado-based nonprofit think tank), says that in many cases the fight for stronger protections is being waged at the local level. Casey believes that federal protections are even more important given all the changes taking place at the state level.
Casey says that where you live does not affect your ability to be financially secure, or be safe in your community. “But unfortunately, it does.”
Brandt, a teen from Arkansas, is now worried about his future. If the state’s ban against transgender care is upheld by courts, Brandt knows that he can always move to another state. However, there is no guarantee that he will always feel safe in another state.
He says, “It makes it worry that if there were to be another, if this happens here, why can’t it happen elsewhere?” “It’s sad.”
Methodology
NPR used data from several organizations, including Freedom for All Americans (ACLU), Freedom for All Americans (Freedom for All Americans), Movement Advancement Project, Trans Formations Project, and Freedom for All Americans (Freedom for All Americans). Pew Research Center provided data on nondiscrimination protections at the state level.
NPR checked each piece of legislation against state legislative databases and bill tracking to verify its authenticity. NPR’s analysis covers all states that have passed anti-trans laws after 2021.
Some laws in certain states could be blocked by court challenges. Other anti-trans policy options may exist in some states, including executive orders. Other governing bodies and local entities within the state, such as schools boards or counties may have their own restrictive policies.
Copyright 2022 NPR. Copyright 2022 NPR.
