Oklahoma Pol Wants To Ban Gender-Affirming Care For People Under 26

So you can rent a car but you can't get hormones?

An Oklahoma state senator with a history of authoring anti-trans legislation filed a new bill late on Wednesday that would make it illegal for a transgender person to get gender affirming medical care before the age of 26. Yes, 26 — an age at which one can legally smoke, drink, vote, get a tattoo, gamble, die in a war and, that last of age-related privileges (besides serving as US senator or president), rent a car while on vacation.

Gender-affirming care, in this case, refers to puberty blockers, hormones and surgery meant to help transgender people look on the outside the way they feel on the inside.

Oklahoma GOP state Sen. David Bullard's Millstone Act of 2023 (named for a Bible passage reading “If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea"), would also make it a felony for a physician to provide gender-affirming care to anyone under the age of 26 and possibly result in the loss of their license to practice medicine.

The Millstone Act would also make it illegal to use public funds, such as Medicaid, to directly or indirectly provide gender-affirming care to anyone under the age of 26. The only exceptions to this rule are for intersex people or for those detransitioning (put rather grossly as "[t]he treatment of any infection, injury, disease, or disorder that has been caused by or exacerbated by the performance of gender transition procedures, whether or not the gender transition procedure was performed in accordance with state and federal law").

Why 26? Well, sure, it could be that scientists say the brain isn't fully finished developing until the age of 25, but it's highly unlikely that the brain of someone who has known they are trans their entire life would finally finish developing some part of their brain that would make them suddenly be perfectly comfortable living as the gender they were assigned at birth. That would be a tad ridiculous.

It could be that this coincides with when people are no longer allowed to stay on their parents' insurance, as some bigoted parents might be upset by the idea of them using their insurance for gender-affirming medical care?

More likely it is because people like Bullard believe that being transgender is simply the hot new trend — like slap bracelets or fidget spinners — and that they will grow out of it by the time they are in their 20s and less beholden to peer pressure. Or, more insidiously, that the less likely young people are to interact with transgender people, the less likely they will be to feel comfortable coming out as transgender themselves. The goal of this, literally, is fewer out transgender people.

The thing is, the longer a trans person goes without transitioning, the more secondary sex characteristics they develop, which makes it more difficult and more expensive to fully transition later on and to be able to "pass" as their actual gender. Puberty blockers are reversible and have been safely used for 50 years on trans children and on cis children with early onset puberty. Puberty, however, is not reversible. It can also be incredibly traumatizing for a child to have to go through the pubertal development of the wrong gender.

There is a tendency to want to associate a trans child being who they are to kids going through normal adolescent " this is who I am now, Mom!" phases — probably because that's the only comparison people who have never questioned their own gender can make. But it is a very, very different thing. Physicians and psychologists are very rarely involved in a child's decision to get unfortunate bangs or decide to become a Wiccan for a week after watchingThe Craft . Transitioning isn't anything anyone takes lightly — it's hardly as if a 9-year-old can walk into a doctor's office, declare themselves trans and get all the surgery and hormones they want. These are decisions made with care, based on the individual patient's needs. Which is exactly what all medical decisions should be.

The Oklahoma state legislature will not convene until February, when it will consider this bill, as well as another bill that would fine physicians $100,000 for providing gender affirming care to anyone under the age of 21.

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