A pre-filed Oklahoma bill sponsored by three Republican senators attempts to criminalize lifesaving healthcare for transgender people under the age of 21, through at least three years of imprisonment and a fine of up to $20,000.

The law considers the following as ‘violations’: transgender people recieving gender-affirming healthcare; supportive parents who help their child access this healthcare; and healthcare professionals who provide gender-affirming services.

In other words, the cost of being transgender and supporting someone who is transgender, in context of this law, would mean three years of imprisonment and a fine of up to $20,000.

The proposed act treats gender dysphoria as a ‘diagnosis’ by citing the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and doesn’t mention the word “transgender” even once: 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.

Trans people know who they are, 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.

Gender-affirming care is also linked to long-term mental health benefits: a study of 2,500 trans folks found that over a 10-year period, the odds of getting mental health treatment decreased by 8 percent for every year since receiving gender-affirming surgery, according to the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Read more stories by trans folks on how gender-affirming care has been lifesaving: https://bit.ly/33K8DK9

OK SB 676 has carried over from last year’s legislative sessions.