We’re just days into the first state legislative sessions of
2020 and across the country, lawmakers are once again targeting transgender
young people with a slate of proposed laws that would bring devastating harms
to the transgender community.

In 2016,
lawmakers fixated on where transgender people go to the bathroom. This year,
lawmakers have zeroed in on transgender people playing sports and receiving
life-saving medical care. It is hard to imagine why state legislators have
decided to prioritize barring transgender young people from sharing in the
benefit of secondary school athletics or disrupting medical treatment
consistent with prevailing standards of care. But here we are, the start of the
session, a time to fight.

As has been the case since
2015, South Dakota is leading the way with legislation targeting transgender
youth. On the first day of this legislative session, South Dakota lawmakers
introduced HB
1057
, a bill that would make it a felony for medical providers to affirm a
transgender minor’s gender. This bill would not only compromise positive health
outcomes for transgender youth, but it would lead to the arrest and
imprisonment of doctors for simply treating their patients consistent with
prevailing medical standards.

That’s right. Lawmakers want
to throw doctors who follow basic medical standards for trans youth behind bars
and leave trans youth with no recourse at all.

Denying best practice medical
care and support to transgender youth can be life-threatening. It has been shown
to contribute to depression, social isolation, self-hatred, risk of self-harm
and suicidal behavior, and more. The “problem” this bill and other similar
bills in Florida,
South Carolina, and Missouri
is supposed to be addressing? That medical providers are treating children in
accordance with long-established standards of care and the Hippocratic oath
they took to do no harm.

Lawmakers want to stop people
from being transgender and they are willing to put doctors in jail and tell
transgender youth that they shouldn’t receive health care in order to achieve
their aims.

Imagine being a young person
in South Dakota who struggled with depression and anxiety in early childhood,
as many transgender people do, because they couldn’t quite identify why they
felt so alienated from their peers, their family, and their own body. Over
time, they come to recognize that they have a gender that does not align with
what they were assigned at birth, tell their family, find support, and begin a
course of medical treatment that is quite literally saving their life. With
bills like those proposed in South Dakota and elsewhere, young people are at
risk of having their lifeline stripped away in an instant. The care that gave
them a chance to live is at risk of becoming a crime. Their lives are at risk
of becoming criminalized before they even get a chance to live them.

And these legislative attacks
go beyond health care. Elsewhere, lawmakers have taken aim at transgender
people through proposed bans on transgender student athletes participating in
sports consistent with their gender identity. These measures would exclude
transgender people from enjoying the benefits of sport on equal terms with
their non-transgender peers. Not only do these bills discriminate against
transgender young people in ways that compromise their health, social and
emotional development, they also raise a host of privacy concerns.

In New
Hampshire
, for example, the proposed law would require any student athlete
whose gender is “disputed” to have medical verification of their sex via “(a) The
student’s internal and external reproductive anatomy;(b) The student’s
naturally occurring level of testosterone; and (c) An analysis of the student’s
chromosomes.” This type of Orwellian intrusion into the bodily autonomy of
youth will sweep much broader than transgender youth and potentially impact the
ability of all young people — particularly young girls — to safely partake in
school activities.

And, if some lawmakers have
their way, this will be the national norm as similar bills are pending in
Alabama, Georgia,
Indiana,
Missouri, Tennessee, and Washington state.

Though lawmakers claim that
these measures are aimed at protecting vulnerable youth, they in fact do the
opposite. And this, too, is a pattern.

The first anti-LGBTQ bill to
pass this session is a Tennessee
bill that allows foster and adoption agencies to turn away prospective foster families
based on the agencies’ religious beliefs — thus limiting prospective parents
for kids in out-of-home care. At the end of the day, with all these measures,
it will be young people who suffer most.

For transgender young people
across the country, this time of year means bracing for public debates over their
bodies, athletic abilities, medical care, and restroom practices. In some
fundamental ways, these are ultimately debates about whether transgender people
should exist at all. The latest round of proposed legislation tells us is that
some people don’t think we should.

We must all fight to remind
lawmakers that we already do exist, that we aren’t going anywhere, and that we
have communities of people fighting alongside us.