Efforts to criminalize providing medical services to trans youth are currently under consideration in South Dakota, Colorado, Oklahoma, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Florida.
The tough part, Skarin said, is working with the young people who are eager to stand up for their rights but when they do so in the halls of power are faced with elected officials who demean and discredit their identities.. “Like, to have to sit with a kid who wants to come testify, wants to engage in the legislative process, and to have to warn them and say, ‘Look, you’re going to walk into this room and you’re going to hear horrible things.
“The children who are affected by this are telling you this hurts them,” Skarin said. “I think the human impact — and I know I’m being a little dramatic in some ways — but it’s incalculable. My god, we are doing this to people and some of these legislators want to treat it like it’s an intellectual debate and [ignore] the very real harm that they are causing.”
Now that the bill is out of committee, Skarin said the fight goes on in perhaps the most demoralizing way. “Maybe we can stop it in the Senate, but that still means that we have to have another hearing in front of legislators, where kids and families [are] in the room and they hear thesethings from the people who are supposed to be leading them,” she lamented. “To put people through that trauma for political theater or to play a game of ‘Who’s more conservative?’.… It’s so appalling that this is the moment we’re at.
But for Skarin, the fight must go on because if the bill becomes a law in South Dakota, it becomes much easier for other state legislatures to pass similar legislation. She’s trying to keep the first domino from falling. With seven other states lined up and ready to topple, the work she’s doing is indispensable.
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