A pre-filed Oklahoma bill sponsored by two Republican Senators, attempts to alter the state’s public health statutes to ban lifesaving healthcare for transgender youth in the state by criminalizing doctors who provide gender-affirming services by suspending or revoking their licenses.

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 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.

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

OK SB583 has carried over from last year’s legislative sessions.