Editorial: Don’t can care: Under cover of caution, bills seek to advance anti-trans agenda

In state legislatures across the country, hundreds of bills are being advanced and passed to limit access to gender affirming care to young people. This effort must be defeated.

Consequential and potentially permanent medical interventions should be approached cautiously and with a patient’s full understanding of both benefits and potential consequences. That much is not really in dispute, yet the boosters of prohibitions on gender-affirming care seem to be living in a different medical reality than the rest of us, one in which people waltz into doctors’ offices and get surgery or hormones on the fly.

In reality, going from A to B is often an expensive, long-winded process that people persist through out of the conviction that this is care they need in order to live full lives. On that front, there’s plenty of evidence that access to both social transition and physical care and intervention can mitigate severe mental health issues in the short and long term.

Every medical professional association that has weighed in has determined that such care is both safe and medically appropriate. Gender-related care such as hormones consistent with an individual’s gender at birth, has long been commonplace without much public hand-wringing or political objection. Contrary to some policymakers’ assertions, it isn’t some unknown frontier of science.

Parents should be involved in any medical, pharmaceutical or psychological treatment decisions over care for minors, but that’s already the standard everywhere. What these bills really seek is cutting off access to care altogether, not only for minors but increasingly for adults as well, under the guise of caution. It’s a similar strategy to the anti-abortion movement’s pre-Dobbs strategy of death by a thousand cuts, not outlawing abortion outright but enacting restrictions on hallway width and waiting periods and generally creating an obstacle course to make abortion services functionally, if not technically, inaccessible.

There’s no level of caution that these legislators will accept, just as there was no level of abortion access that its opponents could live with. Notching victories will only embolden them.

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