Even as the medical community grapples
with how best to provide care to transgender adolescents, some states seek to
ban it outright.
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| Zara Banks, 14, near her family home in Fayetteville, Ark. Last spring, Arkansas enacted the first law in the nation barring physicians from administering hormones or puberty blockers to transgender people younger than 18. The law is on hold pending a legal challenge from the American Civil Liberties Union.Credit...Liz Sanders for The New York Times |
FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — For years, Zara
Banks had been looking forward to her 14th birthday — the moment, last June,
when her life would no longer be on pause.
Ever since Zara, a transgender girl, was
8, she has been certain she wanted to grow up to be a woman. After
conversations with her parents and sessions with a therapist, she began
transitioning socially: changing her name to Zara and pronouns to she/her. When
she turned 9, she began treatment with puberty blockers, drugs that would place
her physiological development in limbo until she was old enough — 14 according
to her doctor — to begin estrogen therapy and develop a feminine body.
But last spring Arkansas enacted a law,
the first of its kind in the nation, barring physicians from administering
hormones or puberty blockers to transgender people younger than 18. The bill,
called the Save Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act, overrode a veto by
Gov. Asa Hutchinson and was to go into effect on July 28, about a month after
Zara’s birthday. It is now on pause because of a legal challenge from the
American Civil Liberties Union.
Zara has been able to get hormones while
the court case proceeds, but worries about what the future holds. “I was just
really happy, after finally waiting so long, to get something that I’ve needed
for a very long time,” she said, sitting in her suburban backyard with her
parents, Jasmine and Mo Banks, amid buzzing cicadas.
