On Tuesday, the Idaho House of Representatives passed a startlingly invasive anti-transgender bill. The bill, HB 675, would criminalize all manner of gender-affirming treatment for transgender minors – not only surgery, but also prescriptions for puberty delaying medications, estrogen, and testosterone.
What’s distinctive about the Idaho bill is that, should it become law, it would make it a felony to take a minor outside of Idaho in order to receive any of the forbidden treatments – a felony with a maximum punishment of life in prison. Prescribing estrogen to a 17-year-old transgender woman would be grounds for a life sentence.
HB 675 is a revision to Idaho’s 2019 ban on female genital mutilation (FGM), from which the felony life sentence provision remains unaltered. There is a bleak irony to the fact that a law ostensibly designed to protect children from having the rigid sexual morality of adults inscribed on their bodies is now being used to prevent minors from exercising agency over their own bodies and identities, even when prescribed by medical professionals. Both FGM and this bill amount to forcing the bodies of minors to fit the expectations of adults without taking the needs and desires of the individual into account at all.
Idaho’s State Seal [Public Domain]
As reported by the Guardian, the bill was approved along party lines, with 55 Republicans in favor and 12 Democrats opposed. Only one Republican, Fred Wood, crossed the aisle to vote with the Democrats; Wood is also the only physician in the Idaho House. (Bills restricting gender-affirming healthcare for minors are opposed by the American Medical Association.)
HB 675 is one of many anti-transgender bills being proposed in state legislatures this year, as Republican lawmakers are banking on the idea that this is the culture war issue of the season that will catapult them back into power in the federal legislature. Similar bills include Arizona’s SB 1138, which originally barred all gender-affirming care, similar to the Idaho bill, but was revised to only bar surgeries. Senator Tyler Pace (R-Mesa), speaking to the Arizona Mirror, claimed this law was in accord with the standards of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), which say that genital, or “bottom,” surgery should not be carried out until the individual has reached the age of majority in their country, though “top” surgery could be carried out earlier.
While these are the current standards promulgated by WPATH, the standards were issued in 2011, and the research into best practices for transgender people of all ages, and especially trans youth, has expanded enormously in the 11 years since the standards were issued. WPATH is in the process of revising its standards, which will likely involve lowering the standard for surgical intervention.
The Transgender Pride flag was designed by Monica Helms. [Public Domain]
“I think it’s important to recognize for all of these standards of care, these are flexible guidelines,” said Loren Schechter, director of the Center for Gender Confirmation Surgery at Weiss Memorial Hospital in Chicago, to the Burlington Free Press in 2019. Schechter is one of the leaders responsible for revising the WPATH standards for surgery. “It is not necessarily uncommon that we will currently perform bottom surgeries under the legal age of majority now.”
Politicians like Pace attempt to cloak the intentions of these bills by claiming they basically the same as the laws in countries like Finland, “one of the most transgender friendly countries,” according to him – a statement that might puzzle trans people in Finland, where legal gender change requires a diagnosis of “transsexualism” and sterilization procedures. But whether these laws are couched in the language of being “just as progressive as Finland” or in the “legitimate state interest of protecting children,” the results are the same: trans youth are being told it will be safer to remain closeted, and that any attempts to live under an identity besides the one they were assigned at birth will lead to catastrophic consequences for themselves, their families, and even their doctors.
Many of my closest friends are transgender, most of whom only felt able to even broach the question of their gender identity when they were well into adulthood. Many trans people regret how long they felt obligated to try to live as the gender they were assigned at birth, and struggled for years to live up to the expectations foisted on them by our patriarchal society. It can only be a good thing for today’s transgender youth, with the counsel of medical professionals, to get to spend more years living as their authentic selves.
As I have written before here at The Wild Hunt, I believe that as Pagans we have an ethical obligation to oppose these kinds of intrusions into the freedoms of trans people. Although it is unquestionably not the same experience, I grew up during the years of the Satanic Panic, and I remember the constant fear I had that I would be “found out” and punished if authority figures ever learned about my Pagan identity. But while I had vague notions of Family Services interventions, transgender youth are facing a world where someone could face life in prison for simply driving them across state lines to acquire hormone pills.
There are some encouraging signs: on Monday, for instance, Judge Amy Clark Meachum blocked Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s far-ranging anti-transgender directive, which could have led to criminal penalties for anyone providing gender-affirming care to trans youth in the state. This might foreshadow other anti-trans laws and directives, like Idaho’s, also being blocked by the courts. But after decades of conservative entrenchment, it is not a safe strategy to rely on judges to defeat these bills. It’s going to take unceasing organizing and activism to protect our trans fellows, and Pagans need to be on the front lines of that work.
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