Gender affirming care is life-saving care. We know because it saved our son’s life.  Thanks to the care he received, he survived his teen years and is now a charming, handsome young man.   

If you’ve never raised a transgender child, you can’t know the daily challenges it poses. Every disclosure to family, friends, your faith community, schools, to name a few, is fraught with emotion and the risk of rejection. This is a tremendously difficult path for any family and it’s not a journey anyone undertakes lightly. 

When our child came out to us as transgender as a teenager, he had already been suffering through years of severe anxiety, depression and self-harm. He was hospitalized due to suicidal thoughts. Like the many other families we know with trans kids, we did lots of independent research, consulted with our faith leaders, and assembled a team of doctors and mental health professionals who had experience treating kids like ours.  

If it weren’t for the support of doctors and healthcare professionals, we are convinced he would not have survived.

SB 480, which would ban gender affirming care for transgender youth, is a cruel and arrogant piece of legislation. It is cruel, because it seeks to deny families access to medical treatment that may be critical to saving kids like ours. It is arrogant, because it says that we parents are incompetent and unable to make medical decisions for our own kids and that Indiana politicians know better. 

Hoosier children, families like ours, will undoubtedly suffer if the Indiana General Assembly votes a gender affirming care ban into law.