That the Texas Legislature’s passage of Senate Bill 14 Wednesday, May 17, was a foregone conclusion only amplifies its cruelty. In recent years, arguably beginning with the 2017 “bathroom bill,” many Texas Republican lawmakers have targeted transgender people. Their legislative efforts have monopolized on misunderstanding and fear about the transgender community, with the potential for spurring great personal harm.
Senate Bill 14 will ban hormone and puberty blocking treatments and surgeries for transgender youth. Once Gov. Greg Abbott signs it into law, Texas will be the largest state to ban transition medical care for minors. The passage pairs with Senate Bill 15, which will keep transgender athletes from playing college athletics according to their gender identity. And it follows Abbott’s order, last year, for Child Protective Services to investigate parents for child abuse if they pursue this care for their kids.
While we have major concerns about the long-term mental health and social impacts S.B. 14 will have on transgender youth and their families, this is also Big Government overreach. Lawmakers should trust parents, their children and medical doctors to make informed health choices.
During hearings, GOP lawmakers often took a simplistic, harmful view of gender dysphoria as a mental health condition. It is a view at odds with leading medical expertise, including treatments the American Academy of Pediatrics supports.
Just 1.42% of teenagers 13 to 17 in Texas identify as transgender, according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law. That’s a small percentage, but it’s about 30,000 youth who will live, along with parents, with the consequences of this law.
Many medical organizations and physicians oppose this legislation.
The Pediatric Endocrine Society opposes bills that target transgender youth, saying they “worsen mental health, increase the risk of suicide, and contribute to poorer overall health for transgender and gender diverse youth.”
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends “taking a gender-affirming, nonjudgmental approach that helps children feel safe in a society that too often marginalizes or stigmatizes those seen as different.”
Cornell University reviewed 55 studies that found a “robust international consensus that gender transition, including medical treatments such as hormone therapy and surgeries, improves the overall well-being of transgender individuals.”
State Sen. Donna Campbell, R-New Braunfels, is an emergency room physician who breaks from this predominant medical view. She has called such treatment medically unnecessary and experimental. When the bill passed in the Texas House, she tweeted it was “the Lord’s victory.”
Transgender people have much higher rates of suicidal thoughts and attempts than the general population and are far more likely to experience a violent attack, such as rape, sexual assault and aggravated assault, according to a Williams Institute survey.
These are the concerns lawmakers should be addressing, not amplifying.
The survey found access to gender-affirming medical care is associated with a lower prevalence of suicidal thoughts and attempts. In Texas, that will be gone.
Several Democratic lawmakers offered amendments to ameliorate this legislation or track its possible impact, including suicide rates of transgender teens, but to no avail.
We understand why transgender people, as well as families with transgender youth, have left the state.
Children who are transgender and their parents — at least, those who have involved parents — have enough to grapple with. Lawmakers who target and discriminate against them, denying health care, are only inviting harm.
San Antonio Express-News
