After years of attempts by Republican lawmakers, Kansas appears poised to join more than 20 other states in banning teens who have gender dysphoria from accessing gender-affirming health care.
In packed hearings Tuesday at the Kansas Statehouse, lawmakers heard testimony on legislation that would bar doctors from prescribing puberty blockers, hormone replacement therapy and other gender-affirming medical care to transgender minors.
It would not ban those treatments for intersex children, born with both male and female features, or those who have hormone disorders or precocious puberty.
“The feeling of being in the wrong body and looking in the mirror to see something that isn’t who I am on the inside is one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to overcome,” said Aidyn Lee, a transgender high school student in Kansas and one of numerous advocates who urged lawmakers to reject the proposal.
Republicans narrowly failed to make a similar bill law last year, after falling just two votes short of overriding Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto. Two House Republicans pulled back their support after learning that the bill could have limited access to mental health care for transgender youth.
This year, with an expanded supermajority, Republican leadership hopes to push the legislation through.
Proponents like Jay Richards, a senior research fellow at the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation, said gender-affirming treatments are dangerous and experimental.
“There's no reliable scientific evidence that these treatments improve the long-term health of these minors, let alone that the benefits outweigh the many risks,” Richards told Kansas senators over video conference. “The harms of these interventions are obvious.”
Lucretia Nold, public policy specialist for the Kansas Catholic Conference, said gender-affirming medical care “destroys, at its roots, God’s most basic plan for human beings.”
But health care professionals and advocates who testified against the bill said gender-affirming care is the only evidence-based treatment for gender dysphoria.
“Access to gender-affirming care is an important part of optimizing medical and mental health outcomes in transgender youth,” said Dr. Angela Turpin, a pediatric endocrinologist in the Kansas City area.
She pointed to a recent study published in Nature Human Behavior that found states that enacted anti-transgender laws experienced up to a 72% increase in suicide attempts by transgender and gender-nonconforming youth.
Turpin said decisions about gender-affirming care are made slowly with collaboration from mental health care experts. She said teens typically transition socially two to four years before pursuing such care.
Some who testified in support of the ban included out-of-state activists who lawmakers have invited to similar hearings in years past. Among them was Chloe Cole, a California woman who pursued gender-affirming care in her teen years and lived as a transgender boy before detransitioning, and Jamie Reed, a former employee of a St. Louis gender care clinic who now advocates against gender-affirming care across the country.
During the House hearing, Reed turned around during her testimony and shouted at those seated behind her, many of them transgender youth.
“To my LGBT community listening, and to all of the young people who have been sold this line that trans is the right way, it is a lie,” she said. “We are resilient and strong. We do not need any medications to change our bodies.”
Numerous transgender Kansans testified that the bill would harm them and their communities. That included D.C. Hiegert, a legal fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas, who said the organization opposes the bill because it forces the government to intervene in health care decisions that should be made by patients, families and medical providers.
“It violates Kansans’ constitutional right to personal autonomy, which the Kansas Supreme Court said includes the ability to control one's own body, to assert bodily integrity and to exercise self determination,” Hiegert said.
Hiegert said gender-affirming care is the reason they’re alive today.
“Kansans have shown you year after year that we do not want this bill because we know it will cause serious harm,” they said. “Kansas children will suffer. Kansas families will suffer.”
Anthony Alvarez, a student at the University of Kansas, described his ability to begin medically and socially transitioning in high school as lifesaving.
But he said now he’s asking himself whether he wants to move to a state that is more accepting of transgender people.
“I love Kansas, and I would like to stay here for the rest of my life,” he said. “Laws like this set a precedent, and they also make me incredibly sympathetic to people that are in my situation that would be affected by it.”
The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule this summer on the constitutionality of a similar state law in Tennessee.
The hearings came on the same day that Republican President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing federally run health insurance programs to exclude coverage of gender-affirming care for Americans under 19.
