When the State Has a Problem With Your Identity
This week, Texas will join the 20 or so other states that have passed laws restricting access to medical therapies and procedures for transgender children. The new law is a triumph for Governor Greg Abbott, who has tried a couple of different strategies to restrict gender transitions, first threatening to investigate parents and caregivers for child abuse and now, in the latest bill, threatening doctors with prosecution. Civil-rights groups challenged the bills, and some medical providers who oversee the treatments have already quit or left the state. The estimated tens of thousands of young people in Texas who identify as trans—roughly 1 percent of the state’s population of kids ages 13 to 17, according to one count—and their families, must grapple with a new political reality.
In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk to one trans girl who found herself caught in the middle of these debates in Texas. She says she’s not an activist. She doesn’t protest for her right to medical care or mention her identity on her Instagram bio. She’s not “super-pro-Democrat,” she says. She describes herself as not a “cheerleader or anything,” just a “normal, semi-popular girl.” She’s grown up with supportive parents, in an accepting community. But just as she was facing puberty, trans medical care became something politicians argue over. She could handle middle-school bullies. It was knowing the Texas government was against her that made her worry that she would be taken away from her parents, and question whether she could stay in the state.
Her mother and father faced an agonizing decision about what to do. They loved living in Austin. But their family was not safe. And they started to see signs in their daily life—in school, in the dentist’s office, at the hospital—that their family was in danger. They ultimately decided to leave, becoming a new kind of domestic political refugee.
“I started realizing that not only it was the kids and the people being mean, but it was the government in my state that was now also against me.”
Listen to the conversation here:
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The following is a lightly edited transcript of the episode:
Hanna Rosin: I’m, like, fixated on your posters. I’m just, like—I really want to start the interview, but I’m just trying to guess what each of the posters are. Who set up your room when you moved?
