The so-called "Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act" in Arizona, sponsored by Republican Senator Wendy Rogers, attempts to amend the Arizona Revised Statutes through language that institutionally polices transgender youth’s identities at schools, and bans their access to lifesaving healthcare.

The bill proposes to alter the state’s educational polices so that school staff would essentially be prohibited from creating safe and affirming spaces for gender-nonconforming and trans youth who might be at risk of hate or abuse at home.

In other words, if a school employee knows that a child is trans, they’d be required to ‘out’ the child to their legal guardians. School staff would also be prohibited from advising the child to avoid coming out to their parents, if it could put the child at risk.

This bill also aims to alter Arizona’s ‘Professions and Occupations’ statute to prohibit healthcare professionals from providing lifesaving care like puberty blockers and hormones to trans youth.

The hypocrisy of this bill is highlighted in how it protects harmful, nonconsensual surgeries on intersex minors, while simultaneously stripping trans youth’s right to self-determination, by criminalizing healthcare professionals who support them.

Meanwhile, doctors will still be allowed to prescribe puberty blockers to cisgender children.

“Puberty blockers have been used for decades in cisgender kids who either are going through puberty too early,” Pediatric Endocrinologist Jason Klein told VICE. “Their use has been FDA approved, well-studied, well-documented, and well-tolerated for a long time now. And it’s the exact same medication that we use in trans or nonbinary children to basically put a pause on pubertal development.”

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, Trevor Project found.

The double standard of these bills and its text follows the common theme of erasure in these legislative attacks: it doesn’t use the word “transgender” even once.

AZ SB1045 was read for the second time on Jan 11th, 2022.

Trans folks on gender-affirming care is lifesaving: https://bit.ly/33K8DK9