The so-called “Kentucky's Children Deserve Help Not Harm Act” proposed by four Republican representatives, attempts to criminalize doctors who provide gender-affirming healthcare while letting non-supportive parents take action against their child’s transition with possible ‘compensation’.

The proposal rigorously aims to prohibit healthcare for trans youth by constructing layers of financial barriers like prohibiting Medicaid and tax exemptions for gender-affirming care, and goes into deep detail about various gender-affirming services that it intends to ban including “aesthetic procedures.”

In other words, it implies that trans folks under the age of 18 should not have the right to healthcare, but cisgender youth can continue getting the same services as cosmetic treatments like laser hair-removal if they want?

Moreover, non-supportive parents taking actions under this act could ask for ‘punitive damages’ related to ‘pain and suffering’; ‘loss of reputation’; and ‘loss of consortium, including the ‘loss of expectation of sharing parenthood.’

If their parents of trans youth are experiencing ‘loss’, it’s not because something is being taken away from them because their child is trans. It is because of the parent's misinformed notions of gender that have been formed by cisgender-heteropatriarchal structures of control.

Trans children know who they are, and don’t need misinformed adults dictating who they ought to be. It’s on the parent to unlearn this rather than to project their internalized securities about gender onto their child.

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, according to Trevor Project.

While the bill prohibits lifesaving healthcare for trans youth, it simultaneously protects harmful, nonconsensual surgeries on intersex minors, and and allows doctors to prescribe puberty blockers to cisgender children.

The bill follows another common theme of erasure and misgendering in these legislative attacks: it doesn’t use the word “transgender” even once.

KY HB 253 was referred to committee on January 8th, 2022.