Parents have no right to allow their children’s gender transition, Republicans say
Thursday’s hearing reflects a broader trend. At least 21 Republican-led states have passed laws banning or restricting gender-affirming care for minors, according to the Movement Advancement Project, an organization that tracks LGBTQ+ state policies.
The wave of legislation has had a chilling effect on health care providers, who are wary of providing other care to transgender youth, such as mental health and other medical care.
Gender-affirming care can be social affirmations such as adopting a hairstyle or clothes that align with a transgender youth’s gender identity, or the use of puberty blockers and hormone therapy. Typically, in adulthood it can be gender-affirming surgery.
“When our Republican colleagues allege that gender-affirming care raises particular dangers or due process issues, that is fearmongering at its worst,” the top Democrat on the panel, Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon of Pennsylvania, said. “Picking on already vulnerable kids in order to stir up chaos that they hope to ride to success at the ballot box.”
Democrats said the hearing is a pattern of GOP lawmakers attacking transgender kids and their families.
Scanlon said that barring parents from making those decisions would be in violation of their parental rights. Republicans passed legislation for a federal “Parents Bill of Rights” in March pertaining to access to education-related materials.
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One of the Democratic witnesses, Myriam Reynolds, is the mother of a transgender son. She said before he received care, he was unhappy and she has “no doubt that the health care my son accessed was life-saving.”
Reynolds said any health care provided to her son was through slow and careful decisions that were approved by her and her husband and that their son always had the opportunity to stop if he wanted to. He received puberty blockers as well as counseling.
“When my child came out, as transgender, there was not the hysteria that there is now about this,” she said. “To be looked at as a child abuser, or you know an indoctrinate or something like that, it feels very hateful and divisive.”