51黑料

鈥� The doctor must keep track of the changes to his genitalia, and have it available for scrutiny.

鈥� The doctor must ensure that his existing mental health issues have been 鈥渢reated and resolved.鈥� This is particularly tricky, because it is my impression that anxiety and depression can only be 鈥渃oped with鈥� rather than resolved.

鈥� Additionally, by threatening to take my son鈥檚 critical medicine away, it is making him anxious and depressed.

Legislators and politicians have decided that they know more about my son and his medical needs than do his parents, his two therapists, his psychologist, his endocrinologist, his general practitioner, his reproductive endocrinologist and, most importantly, himself. They don鈥檛 think that this process has involved years of research, and soul searching, and questioning and fact-checking. They haven鈥檛 been awake on school nights until 2 a.m. to console a child who is mentally replaying a hurtful comment from school. They haven鈥檛 had to listen to people unabashedly spew their hate about one of the few people you鈥檇 die for. They haven鈥檛 had to read countless medical articles to see if the wild assertions about transgender care have the faintest possibility of truth.

The medical decisions that we are making are very personal and belong to no one else besides my kid and his parents. They do not affect anyone else but us. I recognize that others might not agree with our decisions, just as there are some decisions that other parents make that I don鈥檛 agree with. However, none of us know the full story of the family dynamic and what factors have led to these decisions, so we must leave it to the family and let them work through the consequences.

I can confidently say that I know quite a lot about gender identity and expression at this point because I had to inform myself as a responsible parent when my son came out to us in high school. This is nothing that was even on my radar before then, so I had to start from knowing nothing. With each milestone that our son reached in his transition, we had to understand how each decision would affect his life and compare that against his health status.

It鈥檚 really easy to find a medical article that fits a specific narrative 鈥� for example, I still don鈥檛 understand if wine is good for me or not. My simple request before anyone forwards these on a social feed or puts them in a regulation is to actually read these articles and understand what they are saying, and how they got to these results. I could write an op-ed for each of the next 23 days to state personal and documented reasons why each of the 23 studies listed in the emergency regulation are misleading or being used in a different context.

I was so proud to watch my son stand up for his rights when he testified in Jefferson City earlier this month against the Senate Bill 39 sports-participation ban. He had prepared his testimony and practiced it all the way to the Capitol because he needed to tell his story so that others could see he was just a kid trying to be a part of something that included him. Before anyone got to speak, my heart broke as I watched the bill sponsor walk out of the room before even listening to his words.

Leave sweeping bans out of the conversation. Have concerns? Learn the issues and understand why they matter. Have a question? Ask a parent of a transgender kid, and we would be happy to have a discussion about it. We want nothing more than for someone to listen about what we are going through.