The Trump administration’s transgender health care ban would put kids’ lives on the line.

They want my son to die.

That thought has been hovering just below my consciousness for the past year. Wednesday night it surged above the surface. Since Thursday morning, it’s all I can hear.

My son turned 12 last month. He’s in seventh grade. And he’s trans. Yesterday, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stood at a microphone and essentially proposed a federal ban on … him. And that wasn’t the only attack on my child this week.

I should be used to the terror by now. We’re living in Trump’s America, and this time around he’s been truthful about at least one thing: He intends to soar to autocracy on the backs of the trans community—especially trans kids. But the last 24 hours have brought a one-two-three punch.

First, the House passed Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s parting gift, House Resolution 3942, the Protect Children’s Innocence Act, which would make providing or seeking gender-affirming care for minors a crime; then, the White House unleashed what trans journalist Erin Reed called “the single most aggressive attack on transgender healthcare in U.S. history,” a proposed rule that would bar Medicaid-dependent hospitals from providing gender-affirming care to minors; and finally, on the flip side of the Medicaid strategy, the House voted to cut coverage for youth gender-affirming care. While the Senate seems unlikely—please, I think, please—to enact a felony ban on gender-affirming health care for trans youth or approve the cuts to Medicaid coverage, the power of the federal purse strings alone is enough. The Hyde Amendment–like threats to withhold Medicare and Medicaid funds from any hospital which provides such care will force them to stop offering it, and thus eliminate access to it, for the overwhelming majority of trans youth nationwide.

Only those with the privileges of money, geography, and parental support will be able to continue (or start) receiving puberty blockers or gender-affirming hormones from the courageous doctors who dare to treat them outside of hospital systems. (So will cisgender youth who are prescribed those medications for other reasons.) The rest will turn to sympathetic women on hormone-replacement therapy, to the black market of internet forums and gym locker rooms—or to despair. Existing disparities will deepen. According to the Trevor Project’s 2024 survey, 46 percent of trans and nonbinary youth have seriously considered suicide in the past year and 16 percent made an attempt. Studies have repeatedly shown that receiving gender-affirming care can slash that rate by as much as 73 percent. Access to care is among the most protective factors, after having an affirming family and community.

The culture war over trans youth reached a fever pitch in the 2024 election cycle. GOP operatives spent an astounding $222 million on anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ advertising—more than on housing, immigration, and the economy combined. The president’s drumbeat of discriminatory, overreaching executive orders began on Inauguration Day and hasn’t stopped. Twenty-five states now outlaw gender-affirming care for youth, up from one (Arkansas) in 2021, with bans under consideration in Montana and New Hampshire, which means half of all trans young people can’t access care. House Republicans, as Rep. Sarah McBride put it on Wednesday, “think more about trans people than trans people think about trans people,” and have already stripped many trans Americans of their livelihoods and health care, particularly those who are incarcerated, federal employees, or in the military.

My family is fortunate to live in New York, where Attorney General Letitia James and Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani have led the charge to defend our trans community, and where last year’s NY Equal Rights Amendment enshrined trans rights in our state constitution. But their ability to protect trans New Yorkers has significant limitations, hindered further by Governor Kathy Hochul’s refusal to sign three bills which would protect recipients and providers of both gender-affirming and reproductive care. Even in a “blue” state. Even here in what I’d consider to be the safest place in the country for trans kids.

Hence that awful refrain that keeps repeating in my mind. They want my son—and every kid like him—to die. In the wake of the suicide of former Middlebury College swimmer Lia Smith, Erin Reed argued, “Policies designed to make life unlivable for transgender people bear responsibility too; every trans suicide is a murder by those in power.”* I’ll take that one step further. By making life for trans youth too difficult to bear, the GOP is hellbent on a genocide by suicide. (With the assistance of a few spineless Democrats and general distancing of the party from the cause.) And you better believe they’ll be hunting trans adults before long. Eventually, the reprobates clenching the levers of power—whether they really believe the vile things they say about trans people or are merely using the “issue” to whip up voters—will wield them to eliminate all those who stand in opposition to their values.

If this playbook sounds familiar, I’ll give you a one-word hint: abortion. We’ve already seen the right overturn Roe v. Wade, seen its disproportionate impact on people of color, those who live in rural areas and red states, the disabled, and those trapped in poverty. This is where the authoritarian leaders of late-stage capitalism want us: bent over, vulnerable, and powerless over our own bodies and lives. Gender-affirming and reproductive care are two sides of the same coin. We need to unite the forces fighting for both in a joint effort to preserve and restore bodily autonomy.

The bodies and minds of children have long been a particular point of contention in American politics. Conservatives have made parental rights a cornerstone of their theocratic agenda. “By natural right and moral authority, parents are the primary protectors of their children,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon declared in March. Their think tanks argue that parents’ rights trump everything, much as radical organizations like Moms for Liberty do when they confront school boards on “DEI” curricula, vaccine mandates, and “fairness” in sports. But not all parents. Not parents like me. Why are we the only ones who can’t be trusted to make medical decisions in tandem with our children’s doctors? The only ones who aren’t the experts on our own kids?

My son’s due for his biannual Triptodur injection next month. My immediate response to yesterday’s breaking news? I called the specialty pharmacy to place the order. The mere thought of going through estrogen puberty is enough to send his anxiety spiraling. I’ve got to protect him from that however I can. For now, for us, that means staying proactive when it comes to his care—and panicking each night as I lay in bed. If that changes, I will stop at nothing. If the Senate passes Greene’s bill, I will become a felon.

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This has been my life since last November; however, it’s been reality in other parts of the country for years now. Medical providers have been sued. Parents have been accused of abuse and threatened with having their kids removed by protective services. Families have left their homes and communities behind to seek safety and care in more liberal states. As the American Civil Liberties Union’s Chase Strangio explained in an announcement that they will sue to block these laws and policies: If they take effect nationwide, there will be no place of domestic refuge. If our family has to flee the only home we’ve ever known—the America my German Jewish refugee grandma so proudly claimed and served—we will leave. Just like she fled Germany. The irony isn’t lost on me that we could only do so because Germany restored our citizenship as reparation for the devastation wrought on my ancestors eight decades ago.

I often ask my kids, “What’s my most important job as your parent?” “To keep us safe and healthy,” they’ll reply with practiced eyerolls. Simply put, “safe and healthy” are more palatable metonyms for “alive.” I conceived them and brought them into existence. It’s my fundamental responsibility as a parent to keep them here—and my responsibility as a human to ensure the same for all trans youth, not just my son.

I never imagined I’d become a felon. But when gender-affirming care is outlawed, only outlaws will get the care they or their children need. As government persecution of trans people intensifies, it’s going to be harder and harder for those of us with the most at stake to be the loud ones. So, to the rest of you: It’s time to step up.

Correction, Dec. 19, 2025: This article originally misidentified Lia Smith as Lia Thomas.

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