The so-called “Alabama Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act” by Republican Representative Wes Allen, attempts to ban lifesaving healthcare for transgender youth by suggesting that trans people are a public health crisis.

The act is quite blatant about its gender essentialist views, spreading disinformation through its text: “The sex of a person is the biological state of being female or male, based on sex organs, chromosomes, and endogenous hormone profiles, and is genetically encoded into a person at the moment of conception, and it cannot be changed.”

This statement dismisses intersex and transgender people, and science, while also attacking cisgender people, suggesting that everyone is “genetically coded” to perform in a way that is biologically determined.

The act would criminalize doctors providing lifesaving gender-affirming care to trans youth, and could make schools and homes unsafe for children, by ‘outing’ them to potentially non-supportive parents.

It goes on to contribute its bit to the dangerous history of medicalizing transness, claiming that being trans is nothing more than “severe psychological distress.”

A question for the authors of these copy-paste legislative attacks: What is more distressing than believing that your life and personality are all shaped and pre-determined by your biological make-up?

Not only is it invasively violent to discuss someone’s ‘biological-makeup’ as a permanent determinant of their life, it is also just tragically boring, unscientific, and unimaginative.

Arguments attempting to uphold differences based on “biological sex”, fall apart as you dig into the science of how genes, gonads, and hormones keep sex subject to change: “The truth is, your biological sex isn’t carved in stone, but a living system with the potential for change,” Neurobiologist Dr. Simón(e) D Sun writes.

Trans youth know who they are, and the legislation’s baseless claims are putting lives at risk: More than half of trans children were at risk of suicide this past year, and access to gender-affirming care is linked to being at lower risk of attempting suicide by nearly 40 percent in transgender and nonbinary youth.

AL HB 150 was read for the first time and referred to committee on January 18th, 2022.