Wyoming outlaws gender-affirming care

Pediatricians warned that prohibiting this care for trans youth could result in more suicides. But the bill’s supporters highlighted extreme outliers to paint a different, and less accurate, picture.

Wyoming has outlawed gender-affirming care for trans youth. In doing so, it has banned the highest standard of care for a vulnerable population and promised to strip the license of any medical professional who provides what is often considered life-saving medicine.

The new law prohibits doctors and other medical professionals from administering hormone blockers or hormone therapy — despite the fact that these treatments are considered safe and necessary by every major medical and psychiatric association in the United States.

Gov. Mark Gordon signed the legislation Friday. As usual, he took the occasion of his signing as an opportunity to criticize the very legislation he was enabling.

“I support the protections this bill includes for children, however it is my belief that the government is straying into the personal affairs of families,” Gordon says in a statement announcing his decision. “Our legislature needs to sort out its intentions with regard to parental rights. While it inserts governmental prerogative in some places, it affirms parental rights in others.”

The ACLU of Wyoming, which opposed the legislation throughout the session, was swift to condemn Gordon’s decision. Acting Executive Director Libby Skarin writes in a statement that the governor, and all those who ushered the bill across the finish line, chose “fearmongering” and “extremist politics” over the lives of transgender youth.

“By signing this bill into law, Gov. Gordon has put the government in charge of making vital decisions traditionally reserved for parents in Wyoming,” Skarin writes. “This ban won’t stop Wyomingites from being trans, but it will deny them critical support that helps struggling transgender youth grow up to become thriving transgender adults.”

Data and anecdotes

The legislation began its life as Senate File 99, a bill sponsored by Sen. Anthony Bouchard (SD-6) and co-sponsored by 32 other lawmakers.

As the bill made its way through the legislature, both pediatricians and parents of queer youth pleaded with lawmakers not to come between young patients and the care that might very well save their lives.

Trans youth are at a heightened risk of depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation. During a legislative committee meeting this session, Justin Romano, a pediatric psychiatrist from Cheyenne, pointed to research showing gender-affirming care, like social acceptance, decreases those risks.

“When we look at numbers and the data and recommendations from thousands of worldwide experts on hormone replacement therapy, gender-affirming care for young people does decrease depression, anxiety and suicide,” Romano said. “And I think preventing people from getting gender-affirming care will likely raise the suicide rate for young people in Wyoming.”

Despite the growing body of evidence that gender-affirming care is not only safe, but positive for those who seek it out, the bill’s supporters highlighted the stories of detransitioners — individuals who felt they were rushed into gender reassignment and have come to regret the process or individual procedures.

Bouchard has claimed there’s an epidemic of young people who regret their gender transition.

But there is no epidemic. While there are a handful of detransitioners across the country, regret is in fact extremely rare, according to the best available studies on the subject. Those who do detransition, and are willing to fight against others’ access to the same care, have found a privileged position in right-wing circles — receiving prominent spots in anti-trans documentaries or being paid to appear at legislative meetings.

These voices are loud but not representative.

What is gender-affirming care?

Bouchard and his allies misrepresented the reality of gender-affirming care. While the bill bans both surgery and hormone treatments, their rhetoric focused almost entirely on surgery, with Bouchard and others making frequent use of words like “butchering” and “mutilation.”

Bouchard even claimed, on the senate floor, that children as young as five were being whisked into surgery.

This is false, as medical professionals have explained repeatedly in Bouchard’s presence across multiple legislative committee meetings.

Gender-affirming care is not one thing. It’s a broad spectrum of care that takes place across many years. In the pre-puberty years, this “care” takes the form of social affirmation: letting a child dress how they please or go by the pronouns or name of their choosing. As they grow older, if they want to continue, that care can start to include hormone blockers and then hormone therapy in their teenage years. Surgery almost never takes place before the age of 18.

All along this spectrum, the child is in consultation with their parents, doctors and mental health professionals.

Not all children proceed from social affirmation up through surgery and not all trans people decide to surgically transition. The deliberately lengthy process — especially the period during which a child is on hormone blockers — gives patients time to figure out what exactly they want to do and what sort of care would help them thrive.

Conspiracy

Bouchard has also touted the ban on gender-affirming care as necessary to push back on an alleged leftist plot to make kids transgender.

He frequently refers to this plot as “cultural marxism,” explicitly leaning into an antisemitic conspiracy theory echoing Nazi rhetoric of the last century.

The new law goes into effect July 1.