Culture

I’m an LGBTQ+ Attorney. I’m Fighting to Block Alabama’s Dangerous Trans Medical Care Ban


 

In the summer of 2013, I crammed my clothes, my futon, and my dog Bella into a 10-foot U-Haul truck and started the long drive from Denver, Colorado to Montgomery, Alabama, nervous about what my life as a trans adult would look like in a part of the country I had only ever briefly visited. I never would have imagined that almost a decade later, I would be an attorney on the front lines of a legal battle against a nationwide wave of anti-trans legislation that poses a particular threat to families and medical providers here in the South.

As a staff attorney with the LGBTQ+ legal advocacy organization Lambda Legal, I am working with families and medical providers across Alabama in preparation to sue the state should it make the incredible mistake of passing Senate Bill 10, the so-called Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act. SB 10 would subject a potentially limitless number of people — including parents, teachers, doctors, therapists, and social workers — to a Class C Felony for aiding a trans young person in accessing gender affirming, and in many cases life-saving, health care. In essence, it will prevent trans youth from getting medical treatments they desperately need.

That’s why Lambda Legal — along with the National ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project, the ACLU of Alabama, and pro bono law firm partners Cooley LLP — announced last week that we are ready to sue at a moment’s notice if this bill is signed into law by Alabama’s governor Kay Ivey. And while Alabama is the state most directly in our sights, we are also considering the possibility of legal action in the other southern states that have passed bills that would directly harm trans young people by excluding them from school sports teams, including Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, and West Virginia. We will not let trans youth be excluded and harmed because of who they are.

Although I might never have been able to anticipate my own career trajectory, I certainly could have seen this threat coming. If you had told me 8 years ago that legislators in Alabama would be on the verge of causing long-lasting harm to trans children under the auspice of “protection,” I would have absolutely believed you.

For two years before my move south, I lived openly as a trans adult in every part of my life, which at that point included night classes at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, and daytime work as a barista in a neighborhood café.

I had also been on testosterone long enough for strangers to correctly perceive my gender, which was an incredible relief 27 years in the making. But, upon moving to the South, and more specifically, Alabama, I made a quick retreat back into the “trans” closet. I knew I was moving somewhere considerably more conservative and religious, where discrimination was more likely to happen if people knew I was trans, and where I would be without any state-level protections to address it. I needed to find a job (and not get fired for being trans) and go to school (and not get kicked out for being trans) and just be a person in the world without getting harassed, assaulted, or worse.

Even though most people accurately perceived me as a gay man, I decided that during my time in Alabama, it was better if I kept the trans part of my identity to myself.

I quickly learned how challenging it was for many trans Alabamans to access medical care in a state with few resources for them. By coincidence, I found a doctor who would continue to prescribe my testosterone without any insurance coverage. His office was in a nondescript old house around the corner from the local coffee shop where I landed a part-time job to cover expenses while attending school full-time and working as a legal intern at the Federal Public Defender’s Office.

When I showed up to my first appointment to renew my prescription, the doctor asked how long it had taken me to get to his office. Puzzled, I told him it had only taken 10 minutes to walk there from my apartment up the road. He looked back at me with genuine surprise and told me that most of his trans patients drove at least an hour to get to appointments with him, if not farther, from all corners of the state.



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