The recent onslaught on bills directed at transgender youth coming from the Iowa legislature (and many other Republican legislatures) is downright disturbing. It isn’t that Republicans don’t have a point. There are risks associated with puberty blockers and other forms of gender affirming care for young people seeking to transition. But for a party that is supposed to believe in small government, it is hard to fathom how and why they would propose government step in and make a decision both so complex and so personal. If the governor doesn’t believe in puberty blockers no one is forcing her child to take them. It is equally wrong to tell the family of a young person they cannot have access to them. These decisions are being made with doctors who understand risks and benefits. Nowhere in the Republicans arguments is there room for the benefits of gender affirming care. Nor is there any mention of the risks of doing nothing when a young person is struggling with their gender identity.
What the Republicans argue is essentially that the adults in the life of this young person should sit on their hands and wait. For depression and suicide? For social isolation? Do we want to return to the days when transgender people had to lie and hide who they were for fear of the repercussions?
I am not old enough to remember the Stonewall uprising. I have been blessed to live in a time where I could watch the transgender rights movement flourish. I have personally benefited from the struggles of those who came before me. But I am also old enough to remember how different it was to be young and transgender a generation ago. We cannot roll back progress. These backward laws will mean that once again transgender people will have to live in fear of their own government, and perhaps even their own families.
Republicans are free to believe transgender people are obscene. They are not free to make an intimate, personal decision for someone else because they hold onto antiquated, backward ideas that have no place in a modern society. What gender someone is is a decision that cannot be made by any other person, much less a government, even when someone is still young. Simply not reaching out to transgender youth is not an option. They need support if they are to successfully navigate a most difficult transition. They do not need their personal decisions politicized, or controversy surrounding them.
Rather than making sure people know about some young person’s gender dysphoria, what these bills really do is force transgender young people and their allies into the closet and onto the fringes of society. And that is what this all comes down to–a question of individual liberty. Lost in the debate is the right of an individual, even a young individual, to choose for themselves what they believe about their gender identity. In the final analysis, it is not a decision anyone can make for them.
Progressive Without Apology 