LGBTQ+ Individuals Right to Healthcare and the Setbacks They Face
In today’s society, we are growing individuals who try to fit into norms that have already been created but might not fit who we are. For ladies, this can be wearing a dress to a fancy event or simply crossing your legs at the dinner table. While for men it could be wearing a collared shirt and pants to work everyday or going to a fancy dinner wearing a full suit. We dress based on the sex that we are born with until we feel we could identify differently.
You might be wondering how I can identify differentially from my birth sex? There are individuals who are transgender meaning they do not identify with the sex they are born with. For example, we have transmen who transition from a female to a male or a trans woman who was born male but transferred to a woman.Your next question might be how do they change their birth sex to present themselves in society as the gender they are. This is where gender affirming care in the medical field would come into play, in order to better help these individuals in their transitioning.
Gender affirming care, according to the Human Rights Campaign Article states, “Gender-affriming care is life saving healthcare for transgender people of all ages,” diving deeper it’s a range of services to help relieve the symptoms of binary individuals with gender dysphoria. Some examples are puberty blockers which temporarily block puberty or cross-sex hormones in which an individual takes hormones to further identify as their preferred sex. There are also more permanent changes to one’s sex such as gender-affirming surgery which includes changing genitals to facial features. Regardless of age, you need to go through many mental and physical exams before proceeding. Even though these options are available for transgender individuals, it is not always easy to access it within the country we live in today.
In our country today, we have 40.1% or 120,400 trans youth aged 13 to 17 living in the 27 states that have passed bans on gender affirming care, according to another article by the Human Rights Campaign. Also there are states that prohibit public funds from being used to provide transgender healthcare for anyone. On top of this there are hundreds of bills that target transgender, non-binary, and gender expansive youth’s access to age appropriate medically necessary care. These are individuals similar to us today who need medical needs so they feel less depressed and more satisfied with their own life. Without having the ability to transition to the gender they so choose causes higher risk of depression or other mental health issues down the line. These medical resources are necessary to them similarly like we need a check-up each year by our primary doctor for example. Why should they be denied rights to insurance or care if everyone else has the ability to obtain it?
Since 2025, according to the ACP article, “among the 600 anti- LGBTG+ bills introduced in state legislature, at least 139 of those bills have proposed restrictions in at least 39 states on gender affirming care or transgender health,” which is roughly a third of all bills! Again we are blocking individuals to medical care that they need in society today. On a larger level, Trump produced an executive order withholding federal funding from all institutions that “promote gender ideology”, this resulted in shutdown of pediatric gender-affirming care in some cases due to fear of legal repercussions. This also went further into aspects of the military and not being able to change your gender to what you identify on your passport. All of this shows a society that is unwilling to change and adapt to the new LGBTQ+ community.
We need to acknowledge today and into the future that transgender individuals will continue to exist while growing in numbers. As a society, we need to see where they are coming from in wanting to change their sex rather than prevent them to. We need to change as a whole society and accept individuals for who they are rather than what they could be. This will make it easier and a more cohesive world to live in for time and time again.
