The so-called “Youth Health Protection Act” proposed by seven Republican Senators, attempts to systemically erase transgender people in North Carolina by attacking their healthcare, potentially protecting the harmful practice of ‘conversion’ therapy and giving power to non-supportive parents.

Under this bill, lifesaving care for trans youth is criminalized—doctors could be imposed with penalties of up to one thousand dollars for each gender-affirming service they provide, and have their license revoked.

The bill treats gender dysphoria as a ‘diagnosis’: a medicalized erasure that labels being trans as a mental health illness. The medical community needs to unlearn the practice of imposing misplaced diagnoses on identities.

Trans people are not sick for being who they are. It’s the cis-het patriarchal gaze that needs to recover from its internalized wounds around gender, and needs to stop projecting its hurt on trans youth.

The bill puts transition into a medicalized box by attempting to reduce all people to their bodies with its fear-mongering about infertility, following another common theme of erasure in these legislative attacks: it doesn’t use the word “transgender” even once and spreads disinformation by claiming that “numerous studies” have found that with time, people “outgrow” from gender dysphoria and the distress it causes.

It also refers to medically necessary gender-affirming support as an ‘aggressive push’ by doctors, and calls lifesaving care like puberty blockers and hormones ‘experimental’ while simultaneously allowing provisions for it to be used for cisgender children who experience puberty too early or quickly.

Are the bill sponsors of these copy-paste attacks not obligated to cite their claims for the public?

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.

NC SB 514 has been carried over from last year’s legislative sessions. In contrast to anti-trans bills that target minors below the age of 18, this act defines minors as anyone below the age of 21.