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Wyoming will become the latest state to outlaw gender-affirming care for minors after Gov. Mark Gordon on Friday signed legislation banning most procedures and treatments.
“I signed SF 99 because I support the protections this bill includes for children, however it is my belief that the government is straying into the personal affairs of families,” Gordon said in a prepared statement.
“Our Legislature needs to sort out its intentions with regard to parental rights. While it inserts governmental prerogative in some places, it affirms parental rights in others,” Gordon said, also noting that the Legislature passed two bills during the recent session reinforcing parental rights in education.
Senate File 99 – Children gender change prohibition will bar young people diagnosed with gender dysphoria in Wyoming from treatment in the form of puberty blockers, hormone therapy or surgeries — the last of which aren’t performed in the state.
In response to the legislation being signed into law, Wyoming Equality Executive Director Sara Burlingame said the organization “remains dismayed” that Gordon “avoided the hard work of charting a common sense course on healthcare for transgender students and their families.”
“There was an opportunity to find common cause on issues we agreed with: surgery for minors is inappropriate, other healthcare options per the Wyoming [C]onstitution (Article 1, [S]ection 38), should remain the purview of parents and their qualified physicians,” she said in a statement.
Gordon’s decision to “embolden” the bill’s sponsor Sen. Anthony Bouchard (R-Cheyenne) and “his extreme agenda makes it harder for Wyoming families who are counting on their right to make healthcare decisions free of government overreach,” Burlingame added.
Initially called “Chloe’s Law,” the bill was named after a woman who underwent a double mastectomy as a child in California and later regretted it. It succeeded in the Legislature this session amid growing hostility nationally among Republicans to treatments intended to address gender dysphoria in children.
The details
Groups like the Wyoming Medical Society signaled that they would support a ban on gender-affirming surgeries for minors, but argued a more expansive ban that also applies to hormone and puberty-blocking treatments is problematic for doctors working with kids who are struggling with acute gender dysphoria.
Legislation supporters argued children weren’t old enough to make consequential decisions about their gender, and those decisions should be put off until adulthood.
“This bill is designed to protect our children until they become mature adults,” commenter Gary Brown said in the House Judiciary Committee.
Research shows youth with gender dysphoria who don’t receive gender-affirming care — which includes treatments ranging from therapy to puberty blockers — have worse mental health and double the rate of suicidal thoughts and attempts compared to those who do.
Trans people have the highest rates of suicide among any identified group, according to research and a national survey from 2015. About 40% of respondents said they had attempted suicide, and more than a third of those attempts happened by age 13.
As amended, SF 99 doesn’t preclude mental health treatment for minors with gender dysphoria.
“Our Legislature needs to sort out its intentions with regard to parental rights.”
Gov. Mark Gordon
Cheyenne pediatrician Dr. Joseph Horam said in a House Judiciary Committee hearing that hormone and puberty blocker treatments are used in Wyoming, but are often started elsewhere. He also said exceptions in the bill — for genetic sex development disorders and precocious puberty — don’t include all the conditions that physicians may need to use these medications to treat.
“We need to have a bill that addresses a further spectrum of those disorders to allow for physician comfort,” he said.
Lawmakers also considered legislation targeting only gender-affirming surgeries, but it failed introduction in the House because members of the hard-line Wyoming Freedom Caucus said it didn’t go far enough to protect kids.
An attempted House amendment from Rep. Dan Zwonitzer (R-Cheyenne) would have made allowances for “any non-surgical medically necessary treatment that is a health care decision made with the consent of the child’s parent, guardian or legal representative.”
That amendment failed.
Parents, doctors and advocates came out to fight the legislation in committee hearings, arguing that these medical decisions shouldn’t be dictated by the government.
“As a parent of a non-binary child — now an adult — this is an attack on my rights as a mother to make necessary health care decisions for my child,” Abby Kircher testified.
Appropriate gender-affirming care for minors is supported by tens of thousands of medical professionals, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society, among others.
Meanwhile, many supporters of the bill — including sponsor Sen. Anthony Bouchard (R-Cheyenne) — equated gender-affirming care for minors with abuse.
“This is an evil form of child abuse,” he said. “If they want to do that, let them wait until they’re 18 years old.”
It will go into effect in July.
A similar ban on gender-affirming care in neighboring Idaho is still tied up in court after a federal judge blocked enforcement last year, citing violations of the Due Process Clause and Equal Protection Clause under the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Mark Gordon should have vetoed this as it is unconstitutional.
Stop electing these crazy far right fools. Parental rights are only for them and the decisions they approve of for their kids. If a parent makes a decision the far right does not agree with, it is child abuse. Last year Pendergraft said a child is the property of their parents. A dad can marry off his daughter at the age of 12. Another parent can’t give this care to their own child-no matter how badly they feel the child needs it. Another big dish of hypocrisy from the “freedom “ caucus.
I don’t pretend to know the answer to all of this. What I do know is that this repo legislature is not competent to answer the questions. They really don’t know jack. It’s another question that should be up to the parents and their doctor.
Boys are boys. Girls are girls. Boy wanting to be a girl is still a boy.
What business of it is yours? If little girls want to dress up as goatropers and little boys want to wear wigs & dresses, who cares? (except for those of you who are extremely terrified of anything you perceive as different) The Wyo Legislature can’t be bothered to help the municipalities fix their roads and infrastructures and yet it can find time and money to interere with how children self identify? Really?
“Dress up” is one thing, chemical genital mutilation is totally different and has the potential to destroy a whole generation of society. So as the question goes, you’re not old enough to vote or join the military BUT you’re old enough to decide that you were born the wrong gender? I care. Our children and subsequent generations deserve better of us than this destructive folly.
I wonder whether the people on either extreme of these issues realize that most citizens don’t trust them at all. We don’t trust their ability to understand any part of what’s happening and don’t trust them to make wise choices. When we look closely at the reporting, we likewise don’t trust the reporters who talk about the issue.
I don’t know whether this website allows us to write in paragraphs. Websites that discourage substantive discussion often push all text into a single paragraph to keep people from being able to make comments that are better organized. In the text box, I’m dividing a paragraph here. I won’t make this statement every time, but if this comment doesn’t have paragraphs, it will be harder to understand.
When they talk about “gender-affirming care,” they talk about everything from therapy to surgery. They say that youth that don’t get care have worse outcomes than those that do get care. However, the link that they provide is to a page that only talks about “gender-affirming care” in very general terms. The page has more links, so maybe those links cover important distinctions.
I have no doubt that a kid with gender dysphoria who doesn’t receive therapy will have worse outcomes than a kid who does receive therapy. However, good therapy doesn’t consist of telling a kid that he’s a woman in a man’s body or she’s a man in a woman’s body. Good therapy will acknowledge feelings and work to help a kid understand those feelings. Good therapy does affirm the truth that a young person has certain feelings, but that doesn’t mean telling a kid the lie that he/she is in a wrong-sex body.
Undoubtedly, people who believe lies initially feel better when someone in authority tells them that their lies are true. I once had a close friend who was a paranoid schizophrenic. He loved when some fool that we both knew told him that his delusions were true. That doesn’t mean that the best long-term results come from “affirming” self-delusions.
Dr. Frankenstein is never going to be happy with any limitations on his experiments. For doctors who are playing Frankenstein with confused teens, a prohibition on hormonal treatments or puberty blockers is going to seem a great injustice. Some of these doctors may really mean well. Others seem drunk on the power of seeing how far they can manipulate the bodies of young people with mental illness. Stopping them is good policy. If some other state or country wants to turn young people into the lab rats for these experiments, that’s their choice.
The other side of the coin is that intersex conditions really do exist. That some people remain willingly and happily ignorant of these conditions is sad. That many of them resort to their religious views to deny these conditions is even worse. I don’t know whether this law gives legitimate healers enough tools for helping young people with these and similar medical conditions.
Most of us don’t trust anyone on either extreme of these issues. I’m glad that you’ve reported on the new law, but your reporting isn’t shedding real light on the issue.
Wow, thanks for your input on healthcare decisions you don’t know anything about, random person.
Maybe just leave tans kids and their families alone. They already have to deal with so much when it comes to discrimination and bigotry in Wyoming due to being trans. Im an adult daring to transition in Wyoming ND it’s scary for me I can’t imagine what it must be like for these kids. My personal fear is that all this protect the kids from being trans stuff is just a stepping stone to ban gender affirming care for everyone. And also, give me a break about protecting kids. The people pushing that don’t seem to want to do anything to protect kids when it comes to gun violence. Just those scary trans people.
I’m sorry an adult decision about whether to transition ones gender to one they weren’t born with is difficult to consider in Wyoming.Maybe that hesitancy for numerous reasons could end up being a blessing in disguise. I don’t really see outrage against the Wyoming trans community, until that community comes after children and attempts to pervert their thinking on issues they are no where mature enough to sort out. As far as gun violence and not caring about children goes…WHAT? In Wyoming in 2023 over 100 lives were lost due to vehicle accidents. What are we going to do about the vehicles? Due in part to RESPONSIBLE gun owners, Wyoming is a very safe state to live in with low crime rates.