‘Codifying hate and fear.’ Why are KY legislators targeting transgender kids?
On two separate occasions in the past four years, Mary Sciaraffa’s son was hospitalized for having suicidal thoughts. Starting at age 12, he’d struggled with the anxiety and depression that stemmed from gender dysphoria — the certainty that he was in the wrong body.
Things are better now because Sciaraffa’s son, 16, is on a course of hormones that help his exterior match the person inside. He’s starting to thrive, but still faces bullying, a lack of understanding from kids and adults, and now, an attack by the people who were elected to protect him from harm.
Yes, the General Assembly is considering an entire “Slate of Hate,” against gay and transgender kids, including a bathroom bill and a bill to punish transgender athletes. But House Bill 321, filed by Rep. Savannah Maddox, R-Dry Ridge, is in a league of its own in attacking vulnerable children. It would prohibit doctors from prescribing any kind of evidence-based care to transgender minors. That includes hormones or puberty blockers, which temporarily slow down puberty to help children get through an often difficult time, and any elective surgery. Care providers could be charged with a Class D felony. The bill also allows a new category of discrimination, where state employees could not be punished for expressing opinions (probably negative) about transgender people.
Sciaraffa is far kinder to Maddox and her Republican co-sponsors Rep. Melinda Prunty, Joe Fischer and Kim King than they are to her 16-year-old son.
“I think it’s misunderstanding,” she said. “I think the legislators don’t know what it means to be transgender, I don’t think they understand what it means to a family, and everything the family has to endure.”
Things like worrying if they’ll get beat up at school, or shunned at your family church or just the agony of keeping your beloved child alive when they feel there is no place for them in this world.
Beth Scherfee said intensive counseling and treatment helped her transgender son when he could not articulate what he was going through.
“I have no words to describe that horrible feeling in my heart of what this bill would mean for these children,” Scherfee said. “The decision lies solely with the parents and the medical professional and the child, and for anybody to be so ignorant and audacious as to suggest that these parents are somehow complicit in a crime of mutilation of our children is so behind the pale of my imagination that I have to do something, that I have to speak up and be politically active.”
What legislators may not know is that any physical healthcare for transgender kids is preceded by intensive mental healthcare to make sure they are ready.
Keisa Fallin-Bennett is a family practice doctor at the University of Kentucky who runs a clinic for transgender children.
“My primary message is the risk of suicide for transgender children is high at baseline, and if you’re denying them treatment, you risk their lives,” she said. “I’m very fearful of suicidality going up, of them spending their lives in mental hospitals because they’re not able to access therapy. There’s good evidence that therapy reduces dysphoria and suicidal ideation.”
Forty-one percent of transgender children have attempted suicide. The American Medical Association advocates for gender-affirming care for transgender children, including puberty blockers; the World and U.S. Professional Associations for Transgender Health put out statements in light of similar legislation proposed in Florida, South Carolina and South Dakota: The USPATH statement said healthcare “should not be delivered or restricted according to the whims of distant lawmakers who know little or nothing about the circumstances of an individual’s life. Proper medical care for any condition is a matter best negotiated between patients and their trained and qualified medical providers who are relying on clinical evidence and experience.
“These bills attempt to criminalize treatments or at best restrict medical professionals from helping their patients and their families. Since transgender children, adolescents, or adults cannot be legislated out of existence, these bills seem to be a misguided attempt to prevent transgender people from coming forward for services they need in order to live healthy lives.”
Paging Savannah Maddox
I don’t know what Rep. Maddox’s reasoning is behind the bill; I left several messages for her but she did not call me back. Do she and other politicians really believe that parents make up their children’s sadness and confusion, forcing them to go on drugs to satisfy some kind of sick whim? Has she ever talked to these parents, heard first-hand about the fear, uncertainty, worry that they live with every single day?
Is she simply cynical? Looking for red meat to shore up her voter base? On the LRC website, she describes herself as “conservative Christian.” Is she simply repelled by something she doesn’t understand?
Eli Pendleton is a Louisville doctor with a large practice of transgender adults. He said the idea that parents who seek this kind of treatment are somehow acting against their children’s best interest is absurd.
“Yet again, here we are in Kentucky with a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist,” he said. “The amount of due diligence that is done by any physician who prescribes something like puberty blockers, it’s not undertaken lightly, it’s a process, and for some kids it may prevent them from committing suicide, which certainly seems like it would be worth it.”
“It’s just terrifying,” he added. “It’s codifying hate and fear.”
This bill is still in committee, and if wiser heads prevail in the House Republican caucus, it will stay there. But it’s important for people to know what their duly elected legislators are working on, work that targets and hates, work that puts vulnerable children in the cross-hairs. Could anyone who calls themselves a Christian be so cruel?
This story was originally published February 7, 2020 at 7:34 AM.
