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Apr 17

The right to exist: Emporia man shares experience with gender … – Emporia Gazette

Testosterone Comments Off on The right to exist: Emporia man shares experience with gender … – Emporia Gazette

EDITORS NOTE: John Smith is a pseudonym given to an Emporia resident who spoke to The Gazette on the condition of anonymity.

John Smith knew he was a man most of his life.

He just didnt know how to put it into words. When Smith was around 17, he realized that he could apply the word transgender to how he felt, opening a new path to affirming his identity.

I played around with identities for a long time, Smith told The Gazette. Once I started figuring out that I was transgender, I wasnt really quite sure where I fell in the gender spectrum. I played around with nonbinary, gender fluid, but eventually I just kinda came to the realization that I was, in fact, a trans man.

Smith moved from his hometown to Emporia for college, taking a job at a local business and graduating from Emporia State University with his Masters degree last year. Around the same time, Smith slowly began to socially transition, sharing his identity with more and more of his friends and family, before feeling confident enough to come out publicly on Facebook.

At 25 years old, Smith is able to take the reins of his own journey to affirm his gender identity using hormone therapy. Smith is celebrating around four years on testosterone, a change he said started a journey towards feeling better about himself.

I would honestly count it as one of the top ten days of my life, he said. It was so important to me to start being able to get these more physical changes like my voice deepening and everything. Starting to get a more masculine appearance was just so deeply important to me because I felt like I wasnt gonna be able to be myself until I had these changes that were happening, that testosterone was able to give me.

For children under 18 in Kansas, that story could look very different.

Senate Bill 26, also known as the Kansas Child Mutilation Prevention Act would would allow an individual who had gender reassignment service performed as a child to bring a civil cause of action under the Act against the physician who performed such service, according to the language of the bill. It would also require the Kansas State Board of Healing Arts to revoke the medical license of a physician who provides gender-affirming care to minors.

Under the bill, care varying from surgeries to puberty blockers and hormone treatments would essentially be barred from transgender youth.

According to the American Academy Pediatrics, puberty blockers have been in use since the 1980s and are completely reversible if a child changes their mind.

These reversible treatments can also be used in adolescents who experience gender dysphoria to prevent development of secondary sex characteristics and provide time up until 16 years of age for the individual and the family to explore gender identity, access psychosocial supports, develop coping skills, and further define appropriate treatment goals, they said. If pubertal suppression treatment is suspended, then endogenous puberty will resume.

By utilizing pubertal suppression at a younger age, the AAP stated, trans youth may be able to avoid surgery later on and can help combat mental health issues.

[P]hysical changes that are otherwise irreversible (protrusion of the Adams apple, male pattern baldness, voice change, breast growth, etc) are prevented, they said. The available data reveal that pubertal suppression in children who identify as [transgender] generally leads to improved psychological functioning in adolescence and young adulthood.

Hormone therapy, including testosterone and estrogen therapies, can begin in early childhood and are partially reversible until development. The only fully non-reversible form of care, gender-affirming surgeries, rarely occur in youth.

Although current protocols typically reserve surgical interventions for adults, they are occasionally pursued during adolescence on a case-by-case basis, considering the necessity and benefit to the adolescents overall health and often including multidisciplinary input from medical, mental health, and surgical providers as well as from the adolescent and family, the AAP stated.

The Kansas legislature passed the Kansas Child Mutilation Prevention Act 23-12 in the Senate and 70-52 in the House on Thursday, April 6 without a hearing for public testimony, adding the gender-affirming care language to an unrelated bill. Gov. Laura Kelly is expected to veto the legislation and supporters would need the votes of 27 senators and 84 representatives to override it. At the time of publishing, the bill is set to commence on July 1.

Supporters of Senate Bill 233, the bill the Kansas Child Mutilation Prevention Acts language was derived from, stated during the bill hearing that children are too young to make a decision that could impact them for the rest of their lives.

We already have laws in Kansas based on the science that we know that childrens minds are developed enough to make decisions, John McDermott, pastor of Morning Star Church in Lawrence, said at the Feb. 14 hearing. We have drinking age at 21, you cant buy tobacco products at 18 or 21 it really is an exploitation of the vulnerabilities of children.

Two proponents of the bill also shared personal experiences with gender-affirming care and stated that they feel lingering negative effects after receiving surgeries in their youth and later changing their minds.

Opponents of the bill argued that medical decisions should be left to parents and their children and that the bill would cause unnecessary harm to Kansas youth.

D.C. Hiegert, a Skadden Fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas, said that the bill and ones similar to it, whether or not they pass, has a negative impact on trans youths mental health.

This makes sense imagine being a young trans kid in Kansas, having to read about and listen to your elected representatives argue that you should not be able to play sports, that you should not be able to access the healthcare you need to live, that you should not be able to exist at school or in public as yourself. The message this sends to young trans Kansans is that they are not welcome here, they said. Bills like SB 26, that would effectively ban all gender-affirming healthcare for any trans person under 18 in Kansas, would have catastrophic effects for young trans Kansans and their families. Gender-affirming healthcare is medically necessary, safe, effective, evidence-based care, and is the only medical care shown to improve trans youths mental health outcomes. It is live-saving healthcare, which is why countless major medical associations (like the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry) oppose bills like SB 26 and instead support access to gender-affirming care.

The process to gain access to gender-affirming care for Kansas youth can be extensive. For Smith, gender-affirming care only came after multiple visits to licensed professionals.

I had to see a therapist to determine that I was in a good state of mind to be able to consent to this kind of procedure and then once I got that letter from my therapist, it was sent on to an endocrinologist and my insurance had to say Yup, hes good, hes ready to go, Smith said. ... once I got that letter, I set up an appointment with an endocrinologist who did some blood work and then determined what dosage I should be at and how I should be getting my doses of T [testosterone] and everything and then from there I was put on T and then had blood work to check to make sure that everything was going okay from there on out.

Like many trans youth, living in a body that didnt match how he felt inside even while in the process of starting gender-affirming care led to gender dysphoria.

I had been dealing with gender dysphoria for a lot longer than I had ever realized. There was just sort of this disconnect between what people were viewing me as and how I was feeling about everything, Smith said. ... Nothing about the first puberty that I had was fun at all for me. There were so many changes happening to me that I did not like or want at all and then it just kept getting worse and worse until it finally clicked to me.

The gender-affirming care ban is just one of 13 anti-trans bills proposed this year alone in Kansas, and one of five that has passed in the legislature. Hiegert said anti-LGBTQ legislation is on the rise in Kansas and across the nation compared to previous legislative sessions.

For instance, there were just above 40 anti-LGBTQ+ bills filed across the country in 2018. As of April 2023, the ACLU is tracking more than 450 anti-LGBTQ+ bills filed this legislative session, they said. ... Kansans have made it clear that they want a state that is safe and welcoming for all, but legislators in our statehouse have decided they would rather score political points off the backs of an already vulnerable minority population of Kansans than address the issues that truly matter to folks in our state like expanding access to healthcare, fully funding public education, or addressing the economic struggles facing Kansas families experiencing rising inflation and soaring housing costs.

As for trans individuals in the state, Smith said concerns for safety and acceptance run deeper than they did even a few years ago.

I wouldnt feel safe coming out today, Smith said. I did five years ago, and I wouldnt now, and I dont know what that says but I think it says something.

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The right to exist: Emporia man shares experience with gender ... - Emporia Gazette

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