“I just shut myself away from the world for a huge part of my childhood,” she tells them. “That caused me to miss out on a lot because I was scared of being vulnerable with people. Those feelings do still come up at times, and it’s still difficult to work through.”
Her life began to change, though, when she started receiving hormone replacement therapy (HRT) at the age of 13. The treatment helped alleviate the depression that had long been a condition of her existence, and Breshears flourished as her true self came into bloom. She credits gender-affirming care for helping her become more confident and allowing her to finally let people get close to her, when she no longer had to pretend to be someone else.
Because Breshears is no longer a minor, she says she won’t be affected by the enactment of HB 1570, but given her own experiences, she worries for the trans youth who will be.
“I can only imagine if I had just started hormones and I started receiving this care. With how life-changing that was for me and then all of a sudden, it was taken away…” she trails off before adding: “This is going to drastically raise the suicide rates in Arkansas for trans youth, which are already extremely high.”
Both Rios Stafford and Breshears credit the governor for being open to what they had to say. Rios Stafford, who serves as the justice of the peace for the Washington County Quorum Court, says that Hutchinson kept them for 10 minutes longer than the half hour they initially had scheduled because he asked so many questions. As she recalls, he wanted to know everything from the overall size of the trans population to whether Rios Stafford, who is 48, would have taken advantage of hormone treatment if she had the opportunity when she was in high school.
While Rios Stafford says she got the impression from their meeting that Hutchinson “was making an honest effort to understand a complex subject that he had very little familiarity with,” she was nonetheless gripped with fear after walking out of his office. “Did I screw it up for trans kids across the nation because I answered a question wrong?” she couldn’t help but wonder.
“I felt like a lot was riding on this, not just for Arkansas, but also for other bills and other states,” she says. “Depending on what the governor did, it could potentially have had a domino effect.”
Based on the governor’s veto, Rios Stafford says she felt like they got through to him. In addition to refusing to sign HB 1570 into law, Hutchinson issued a strong statement condemning the bill that mirrored many of the same points they had discussed. For instance, Rios Stafford expressed during their meeting that she didn’t understand how Republicans, who brand themselves as “the party of limited government,” could support a proposal that is the “definition of big government.” Accordingly, the governor slammed HB 1570 as “vast government overreach.”
“While in some instances, the state must act to protect life, the state should not presume to jump into the middle of every medical, human and ethical issue,” he said in a news conference last Monday.
In the days since those remarks, Hutchinson has continued speaking out against Arkansas’ Republicans unrelenting attempts to discriminate against the trans community. After HB 1749 passed the Arkansas House by a 62-21 vote, he claimed that his Department of Education will be evaluating attempts to allow teachers to misgender and deadname trans students. “This bill is unnecessary,” he said in a statement cited by the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.
But despite his recent conversion to some trans rights causes, it remains to be seen whether Hutchinson — who has still continued to defend his decision to sign the anti-trans sports bill — will have the power to stop these efforts. To override another gubernatorial veto, all conservative lawmakers need is a simple majority in the legislature, and Republicans wield a supermajority in both houses.
