A Wisconsin bill by three Republican senators and 12 representatives attempts to ban lifesaving healthcare for transgender youth by making it illegal for healthcare professionals to provide gender-affirming services, and uprooting financial barriers to make it inaccessible.

The bill goes into extensive detail about biology in an attempt to write gender essentialist concepts into law by reducing people to their chromosomes, anatomy and biological make-up.

Regardless of the future of this bill, its harm would be experienced far beyond the courts – 85 percent of transgender and nonbinary youth said in a poll, that their mental health was negatively impacted by last year’s record-breaking legislative attacks on their identities.

While the bill prohibits lifesaving healthcare for trans youth, it simultaneously protects harmful, nonconsensual surgeries on intersex minors, and follows another common theme of erasure and misgendering in these legislative attacks: it doesn’t use the words “transgender” and “intersex” even once.

This aggressive push to impose a gender binary onto all youth by these copy-paste anti-trans bills, is an attack on science itself.

The arguments upholding differences based on “biological sex”, fall apart the more you dig into the science of how genes, gonads, and hormones keep sex subject to change: “The truth is, your biological sex isn’t carved in stone, but a living system with the potential for change,” Neurobiologist Dr. Simón(e) D Sun writes in the Scientific American.

Trans youth know who they are, and bills like these 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.

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.

WI SB 915 was read for the first time and referred to committee on 1st February, 2022.