The so-called Save Adolescents from Experimentation Act by Republican Representative Gabe Firment, attempts to ban lifesaving healthcare for transgender youth in Louisiana by criminalizing doctors providing this healthcare, making schools unsafe, and uprooting financial barriers against access to care.

The bill would make schools unsafe spaces for trans youth, by requiring staff to ‘out’ students to parents who could be non-supportive, and would give non-supportive guardians the power to bring cases against gender-affirming healthcare providers, up to 20 years after they’ve provide lifesaving care to a child.

In line with these coordinated legislative attacks against trans youth across the country, the 10-page long proposal spreads misinformation that attempts to claim that trans and gender non-conforming youth will ‘outgrow’ being who they are.

It conflates being trans with mental distress as a means to strip trans folks from our autonomy rather than to analyze the barriers that often cause this mental distress: it claims that gender-affirming care increases the risk of suicide, when multiple studies verify that the opposite is true.

Trans folks who have access to gender-affirming hormone therapy in their teens have better mental health than those who wait until adulthood or don’t have access to treatment they need –odds of severe psychological distress were reduced by 222 percent for trans youth who had access to hormones early adolescence, according to research on 27,000 people, led by Stanford.

Moreover, we don’t need studies to justify this, let’s just reason it out: Wouldn’t access to being yourself help you live, and wouldn’t attacks against you for being who you are, make it tougher to survive?

Trans youth know who they are, and bills like these are putting lives at risk: More than half of trans children were at risk of suicide this past year, and access to gender-affirming care is linked to being at lower risk of attempting suicide by nearly 40 percent in transgender and nonbinary youth.

While the bill prohibits lifesaving healthcare for trans youth, it simultaneously protects harmful, nonconsensual surgeries on intersex minors.

LA HB 570 was referred to the Committee on Health and Welfare on March 14th, 2022.