JACKSON, Miss. — Transgender youth in Mississippi were banned from receiving gender-affirming health care after Republican Gov. Tate Reeves signed legislation making certain treatments illegal on Tuesday.
Gender transition surgeries, hormone therapies, and puberty blockers are all banned for minors under House Bill 1125. The law comes amid a wave of anti-transgender legislation in largely red states.
As of last June, more than a dozen states had restricted access to gender-affirming care for youth or considered laws that would do so, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Similar bans are making their way through legislatures or have recently passed in Utah, South Dakota, and Tennessee.
Medical groups including the World Health Organization, the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Psychiatric Association all point to gender-affirming care as the only effective treatment for gender dysphoria, with which many transgender people are diagnosed.
Rob Hill, state director for Human Rights Campaign, has been tracking the Mississippi bill since the session began at the start of the year.
“My reaction to it initially was sadness because I know how this is going to impact families, trans kids in Mississippi who are already very vulnerable, but that turned as this bill was fast-tracked through the House and the Senate and now to the governor’s desk for his signature,” Hill said shortly before the signing ceremony began. “It’s anger now. I’m angry at the governor and lawmakers for making decisions they shouldn’t.”
Eighteen stories above him, the mood was very different. Local Republican Party officials chatted with the lawmakers who shepherded the bill through the two chambers across the street. They were soon joined by Reeves and Matt Walsh, who hosts a show for the conservative media outlet the Daily Wire.
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“This dangerous movement attempts to convince these children that they’re just a surgery away from happiness. It threatens our children’s innocence, and it threatens their health,” Reeves said.
Reeves, who said through this law Mississippi will “follow the science,” said rather than undergoing medical procedures, children should be told they are accepted and loved for who they are — meaning the biological sex listed on their birth certificates.
Critics of HB 1125, including Hill, say politicians like Reeves can’t know more about how to help a child than that child’s parents and doctors.
“It’s an overreach. It’s dictating something that they have no real knowledge about,” Hill said.
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Reeves said in response that an adult can decide with a doctor whether to have these procedures, but a child should not be allowed to.
“I am highly against 30-year-olds and 40-year-olds getting these types of surgeries, but the libertarian in me kind of says if that’s what you want to do to your body, OK. But not to children,” Reeves said.
Beneath the heated language surrounding the impact of gender-affirming care is the question of whether these procedures are actually happening in Mississippi. There is no evidence that gender transition surgeries, the procedure Reeves most often references, are being performed on minors in in Mississippi.
Some transgender people between the ages of 16 and 18 do currently use puberty blockers, though this law now makes that illegal. Reeves said the law is necessary, even if the procedures aren’t happening.
“If we want to take the position that, ‘Hey, we’re just doing this on a preventative basis… because we don’t want it to happen in our state,’ then that’s fine for us to say that, and I’m willing to take this as a victory if that’s the case,” Reeves said.
Even if the number of people currently receiving gender-affirming care is small, transgender people and activists have said the message this law sends could have a wide impact.
At a rally earlier this month, a 16-year-old transgender person said that the bill would pose a real threat to the lives of transgender youth, who already face disproportionally high rates of suicide and depression.
“It has been said this bill is about saving children, but this bill is really about removing the parents’ ability to save their own children,” Leviathan Myers-Rowell said. “HB 1125 is in the media and is telling society that there is something wrong with people like me and my parents. HB 1125 will be the reason that more of my community and more of my friends die.”
Questions remain over whether doctors will be able to prescribe the same drugs often given to transgender people in order to pause the onset of puberty in people who use them for other purposes, including to treat health conditions like abnormally early puberty and idiopathic short stature.
Reeves said a transgender minor would likely be barred from receiving the drugs even if they were prescribed for purposes other than gender-affirming care, and that doctors should know their patients well enough to know when to enforce that ban.
Any physician found to be in violation of the new law risks losing their medical license.
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Shortly after the law was signed, a group of advocates released a joint statement through the Campaign for Southern Equality.
“Gov. Reeves’ decision to sign this bill is an act of violence. He and the lawmakers who pushed this bill in Mississippi are willfully ignoring the unique needs of transgender young people, interfering with their medical care and sending a stigmatizing, exclusionary message,” said Mickie Stratos, president of the Spectrum Center in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. “Advocates for transgender equality in Mississippi and beyond will continue doing everything in our power to care for and protect trans youth in our state.”
Hill said activists plan to keep fighting for transgender Mississippians’ ability to access care, including possible court challenges.
He also had a message for the state’s transgender youth: “My message is that I love you, and there are plenty more people who care about you than don’t.”