CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — Thursday, March 31 is Transgender Day of Visibility. the LGBT Foundation said this day is to celebrate trans and non-binary people and raise awareness of discrimination faced by trans people worldwide.
In Texas, last month, Attorney General Ken Paxton issued a nonbinding legal opinion arguing that some gender-affirming care for minors could be considered child abuse. Four days after the opinion published, Gov. Greg Abbott directed the Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate parents facilitating gender-affirming care for their kids.
A Texas appeals court then reinstated a temporary injunction blocking Texas from investigating parents for child abuse if they allow their transgender children to receive gender-affirming care.
Paxton then recently announced he is investigating two pharmaceutical companies — Endo Pharmaceuticals and AbbVie Inc. — for allegedly advertising puberty blockers to children and their parents to treat gender dysphoria.
The medical community supports gender-affirming care for transgender people but several people have come out to speak against it.
So... what is gender-affirming care? Dr. Salim Surani joined First Edition to explain.
"One of the key things is we know that anytime someone has the gender that feels different from their birth gender, I think that creates a lot of social pressures and stresses on them," Surani said. "People always feel like gender affirming care is just like going to surgery and changing the gender, which it's not."
Surani said those who have gender dysphoria, which is described as clinically significant distress or impairment related to a strong desire to be of another gender, need support.
"We know that they are going through a lot of stresses and if you're not going to address it, we are going to have a lot of mental health crises, suicidal rate will be high in those populations and sometimes those children need a little bit more time and that's where the puberty blocker drug comes in," Surani said. "It gets them some time to figure out what they really want to be."
According to Mayo Clinic, children can not just begin these puberty blockers at any time.
To begin using pubertal blockers, a child must:
- Show a long-lasting and intense pattern of gender nonconformity or gender dysphoria
- Have gender dysphoria that began or worsened at the start of puberty
- Address any psychological, medical or social problems that could interfere with treatment
- Have entered the early stage of puberty
- Provide informed consent
When a child hasn't reached the age of medical consent, the Mayo Clinic said, parents or other caretakers or guardians must consent to the treatment and support the adolescent through the treatment process.
Further, all physical effects of puberty blockers are reversible. Puberty will resume if the drugs are discontinued.
"One has to be supportive from the medical point of view, because if we don't, there is a high risk of mental health care burden, especially in those populations," Surani said. "People have to be tolerant."
Gender confirming surgeries do not come into play until later in a person's life, Surani said.
"In life, we don't always take good choices, Drinking is bad, smoking is bad, but we do that and people make those choices, and we have to be supportive and make sure we tell them the facts," Surani said.
Surani said doctors are not here to play politics and just want to be supportive to anyone needing medical care.
"If anyone needs medical care, we will always be there without any discrimination," Surani said.
You can watch the interview in full above.
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