IN 2021, WE NEED TO PROTECT TRANS KIDS
Dr. Michele Hutchinson, a physician at the Arkansas Children’s Hospital Gender Spectrum Clinic, testified before the state Senate in March that there were “multiple kids in our emergency room because of an attempted suicide, just in the last week,”and that “since then, I have had one of my own patients attempt suicide.” The Institute for Personal Growth, the agency I led until 2019 and which is New Jersey’s largest provider of affirmative mental health care to transgender youth, reports more suicide attempts among patients, by an exponential factor, in 2021 than ever before- most by transgender adolescents and youth.
Why? Covid has been tough on everyone, and on isolated young people more than most – but it isn’t Covid. It’s our political climate. Transgender people, and especially trans kids and youth, have become the latest target in the right wing culture wars. Dr. Hutchinson was testifying about the impact that legislation has had upon the mental health of the young trans kids in her care.
On April 15, CNN reported that 2021 has been a ‘record-breaking year’ – for anti-transgender legislation! Thirty-three states have introduced over 100 bills designed to curb the rights of transgender people. Most alarmingly, the majority of the bills are directed at transgender children and teens.
You may remember the infamous upsurge of ‘bathroom bills’ in 2016, propelled by a pseudo-scare that ‘men claiming to be women,’ i.e., transgender women, would prowl women’s rest rooms for victims to rape. The bills advanced despite the lack of even one case where this had occurred. North Carolina actually enacted a bathroom bill, which was later repealed after a public outcry and business boycotts.
This year’s ‘bathroom bill’ involves women’s sports. Thirty-one states have introduced bills that would ban transgender girls from playing on girls’ sports teams, and three states – Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee- have already signed these bills into law. What is most ridiculous about these laws is that they are, as one LGBTQ activist quipped, “a solution in search of a problem.” They purport to be about ‘fairness,’ claiming trans girls have an inherent advantage because they were assigned male at birth. Like the bathroom bills of a few years ago, there is little or no evidence that this is an actual issue. Even the legislators that propose the bills cannot provide examples where the presence of transgender athletes in youth sports has been problematic. And trans female athletes have never been shown to actually have an advantage; none, for example, have ever qualified for the Olympics. Transgender rights advocates hope that a public outcry will result in these laws going the way of ‘bathroom bills.’
More problematic are the bills that ban gender-affirming health care for minors. To be clear, medical intervention is never recommended for children younger than adolescence – the hysterical cries about ‘sterilizing children’ are completely off base. But puberty suppressing drugs, social transition, gender-affirming psychotherapy and, later in adolescence, hormone therapy are interventions that are recommended by all mental health and pediatric societies, and that are often lifesavers. A 2020 study by the American Academy of Pediatrics found such treatments lower the risk of long term suicidal thoughts in trans adolescents treated with blockers, for example. Arkansas has already signed such a bill into law, and similar bills have been introduced in nineteen other states.
These bills will have a terrible negative impact. I’ve been working with transgender clients for over thirty years, and I have hailed the advent of interventions like puberty blockers that allow trans teens to have a ‘time out’ to solidify their identity. Blockers are fully reversible, but they alleviate much of the dysphoria that results from a trans kid observing their body developing in a way that clashes with their gender identity. The Trevor Project found that the suicide rate for trans youth is five times that of cisgender peers. Gender affirming treatment lowers that rate and brings quality of life to a population that for decades suffered quietly in the closet or, worse, gave up on life.
There are a lot of misconceptions about trans youth and adolescents. I’ve addressed many of them in other writings, see links below. And there is no doubt that political conservatives have jumped on the the ‘transgender issue,’ especially where children are involved, as the latest flash point in the ongoing culture war with the Left. The situation is worsened by idiots like J.K. Rowling (stick to writing, J.K.) who has a huge platform and is using it to give her thoroughly uninformed and biased opinions about gender.
But make no mistake, the net result of these wars – and these laws – is misery for tens of thousands of transgender and gender expansive children and adolescents. Now is the time to fight back against this backlash.
Read more about this at:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/15/politics/anti-transgender-legislation-2021/index.html
https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2020/01/21/peds.2019-1725/tab-e-letters?versioned=true
https://www.psychotherapynetworker.org/blog/details/771/the-world-of-gender-fluidity
https://www.psychotherapynetworker.org/magazine/article/2551/in-consultation/f6e4bafe-7ff9-4a61-a36d-ece90118a949/OIM
