Another transgender bill in Idaho puts government ahead of doctors

We are pediatricians with serious concerns about a harmful bill, House Bill 465, which will soon be heard by the legislature’s House Judiciary committee. It’s one of several anti-transgender bills this session that needs to be defeated, including a rule change that prohibits transgender people from obtaining accurate identification (House Bill 509), and one that prohibits trans kids from participating in youth sports according to their lived gender (House Bill 500).

As physicians, we find HB 465 particularly egregious because it infringes on the physician-patient relationship by denying our ability to provide medically necessary care to young people. We do not let the government tell us how to treat cancer or heart failure, and we should not let them legislate how we care for our children.

The bill would potentially jail health care providers for simply doing our job and following the professional ethics of the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and other respected scientific and medical institutions.

Families would be forced to leave the state or accept less than the standard of care for their children, putting them at high risk for adverse health outcomes such as suicide and depression. As Idahoans, we need to support all of our families and give children and adolescents access to the best care available.

This bill is exactly why politicians should leave medical decisions to physicians and our patients, as it displays a fundamental ignorance about treatment standards and options for transgender youth. This care can mean life or death since suicide rates and depression are much higher among transgender and gender-diverse youth that are not accepted by adults and are not offered gender-affirming care.

This care is individualized for each patient and their family, and recognizes the need to value every child for who they are. Care options are geared toward helping a child feel more comfortable in their body and may or may not include mental health treatment, support for parents and siblings, non-permanent appearance changes, medications to delay puberty, eventual hormone therapy, or gender-affirming surgery.

All of these are done with careful thought by trained medical professionals in conjunction with the patient and their family.

Current standards adopted by every major medical association in the country advise giving appropriately selected youth the choice to delay puberty until they are ready to make their own decisions about their lived gender. These treatments are safe and have been used for decades for children with growth and puberty disorders.

As they approach adulthood, some of these children will decide to stop medication and progress through puberty as they would have without treatment and others will decide to transition to their lived gender. This bill removes that choice, irreversibly forcing kids to go through puberty in a body that doesn’t reflect who they are, causing severe emotional distress.

As pediatricians, we find it unacceptable to be put in a position where we would be criminalized for offering life-saving treatment.

Please join me in telling members of the House Judiciary committee that it’s medical professionals, not politicians, who should decide what medical care is in the best interest of a patient.

Contact the committee at hjud@house.idaho.gov or call them at 208-332-1127.