Opinion | What Decades of Providing Trans Health Care Have Taught Me

By Marci L. Bowers

This year more than 350 anti-transgender bills have been introduced in state legislatures, pushing discussion about treatment for trans and gender-diverse patients further into the national spotlight. It isn’t hard to surmise that politically convenient doubts about the validity of trans identities have come to take the form of prohibitions against trans health care.

In states where such anti-treatment bills have passed, families are already in despair. Some fear losing health care for their children or losing their children altogether. Some are simply moving. Doctors and mental health workers in some states would...