FOR TRANS YOUTH, LIFESAVING CARE IS ON THE LINE AS THEIR DOCTORS FACE INCREASED HARASSMENT
DR. GINA SEQUEIRA FIRST SAW THE PROTESTERS ON A clear morning last September. A co-director of Seattle Children’s Gender Clinic who provides gender-affirming care to young people, Sequeira had confronted ignorance about her medical specialty in the past. But nothing had prepared her to see people outside her office, waving signs and handing out flyers warning of the “dangers” of the work she does.
“That was really, really hard for us as a clinic,” she says. “And I think it was really hard for the hospital’s patients and families who witnessed it.”
Just a month later, protesters showed up again.
Hers wasn’t the only clinic having a hard time in 2021. The LGBTQ advocacy group Human Rights Campaign has calculated that, last year, conservative lawmakers introduced more than 130 antitrans bills in state legislatures—including 35 that explicitly limited the ability of trans and gender-expansive youth to access gender-affirming care, a term that refers to holistic psychological and medical care that affirms a person’s gender identity. As of Feb. 11, the ACLU had tracked similar bills in at least 17 state legislatures so far this year.
Only a small group of pediatricians provide such care in the U.S., and in this political context, those who do are often finding themselves at the receiving end of growing harassment—even as research confirms the potentially lifesaving nature of the work they do. Amid an increasing focus on trans youth in conservative media, demonstrators have organized protests across the country; in Ohio, billboards have been rented—including one near a children’s hospital—to spread disinformation about affirming care. Pediatricians tell TIME they
