Transgender Youth Story Archives - Page 2 of 4 - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Legislature Begins Special Session And Making Crimes Stick, This West Virginia Morning

On this West Virginia Morning, Gov. Jim Justice called the legislature into special session Sunday afternoon, and News Director Eric Douglas speaks with WVU researchers about their work to analyze duct tape and make it even stronger evidence in court.

On this West Virginia Morning, Gov. Jim Justice called the legislature into special session Sunday afternoon to address the state’s corrections employment crisis, to help fund first responders and to clarify the vehicle tax rebate. Those are just 3 of 44 items on the governor’s call and Randy Yohe has our story.

News Director Eric Douglas spoke with Tatiana Trejos, an associate professor at the WVU Department of Forensic and investigative sciences to find out more about their work to analyze duct tape and make it even stronger evidence in court.

Also, Curtis Tate has the story of a transgender student in Harrison County that can continue to participate on her school’s track team after a federal court ruling, and Randy Yohe reports on a West Virginia communications workers union has agreed not to strike and continue contract negotiations.

West Virginia Morning is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, which is solely responsible for its content.

Support for our news bureaus comes from Concord University and Shepherd University.

Listen to West Virginia Morning weekdays at 7:43 a.m. on WVPB Radio or subscribe to the podcast and never miss an episode. #WVMorning

Appeals Court Again Allows Transgender Student To Participate In Sports

The Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, has denied a bid by West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey to allow the state to enforce a ban on transgender student participation in school sports.

A transgender student in Harrison County can continue to participate on her school’s track team, a federal court has ruled.

Lawmakers passed, and Gov. Jim Justice signed, HB 3293 in 2021. The student, Becky Pepper Jackson, challenged the law, represented by the ACLU of West Virginia and Lambda Legal.

A U.S. district judge in Charleston upheld the law in January. Pepper Jackson appealed to the Fourth Circuit, which allowed her to continue her participation on the track team.

On Friday, the Fourth Circuit rejected Morrisey’s assertion that Pepper Jackson’s improvement in discus and shotput was unfair to her teammates and she should be ineligible to participate.

Judge Steven Agee, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, dissented.

National Survey Shows Concerning Mental Health Results In LGBTQ Youth

May is Mental Health Awareness Month and a recent nationwide survey of the LGBTQ community revealed concerning numbers.

For the past five years, the Trevor Project’s annual survey on the Mental Health of LGBTQ Young People has asked LGBTQ youth, ages 13 to 24, from across the United States about their experiences in the past year. This year’s results from more than 28,000 respondents raise concerns about child and student mental health.

Of those surveyed, 41 percent seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year — and young people who are transgender, nonbinary, and/or people of color reported higher rates than their peers.

Jeneice Shaw, a licensed psychologist and assistance and training director at the Carruth Center for Counseling and Psychological Services at West Virginia University (WVU), said that LGBTQ youth are dealing with additional stressors from a young age.

“Often what you see is that queer students, or queer folks in general, have a lot of extra added stress, because their identities are politicized,” Shaw said. “Especially young queer folks have more to manage in a lot of ways, so they have higher levels of anxiety, higher levels of depression, higher levels of attempted suicide than the cisgender or heterosexual population.”

Shaw said one benefit she’s seen is that younger generations are more open to conversations about mental health, but stigma still persists. One of the survey’s findings was that even though 81 percent of respondents wanted mental health care, only 44 percent were able to access it.

Shaw recognizes that many of the issues impacting LGBTQ people are systemic, and can’t be resolved in a therapy session. But the survey also found that small changes like living and going to school in gender-affirming environments significantly reduced the risk of suicide.

“Broadly, respecting people’s wishes and decisions like having gender neutral bathrooms in schools and spaces that are easily accessible. Not politicizing the health care for trans and non-binary folks, which we see happening a lot,” Shaw said. “I just think there’s a lot of bigger societal pieces that are threatening the existence of trans and non-binary folks, of like, ‘You don’t exist,’ kind of thing, like, ‘This isn’t real.’ And that’s not true.”

Ash Orr works as a press relations manager for a national LGBTQ nonprofit. Locally, he is a board member for Project Rainbow, an organization working to provide housing support for displaced LGBTQ members. He said that housing instability can exacerbate mental health issues.

“Here in West Virginia, we have the highest amount of trans individuals per capita of anywhere else in the country. And housing is already such a sensitive issue for the LGBTQ community, even if you take away the ongoing attacks that are happening to our community,” he said. “Housing is something that is stressful to navigate as a queer, trans person. You have to think about, ‘Is this landlord safe? Are the individuals that I may be neighbors to, are they safe? Will this be a place that I can come out to as being queer or trans while living here?’”

The Trevor Project’s survey found that less than half of LGBTQ youth — 40 percent — found their home to be LGBTQ-affirming. The survey also found that transgender people are much more likely to consider suicide. More than half of all trans men surveyed considered suicide in the past year, double the rate of cis men surveyed — cis meaning identifying with their assigned gender at birth.

“We do see a lot of younger individuals, especially now with everything going on in our state and in Appalachia, seeking housing assistance and discrimination assistance,” he said. “These issues are systemic, but they also intersect with one another, and that’s why we really do need a whole system overhaul when it comes to how we are looking at mental health access, mental health providers and services, as well as unsheltered services and resources.”

Megan Gandy, an associate professor and Behavioral Social Work program director at WVU, said that for things to improve for LGBTQ youth, it will take everyone working together.

“The thing that really struck me the most was just the fact that it takes a community for LGBTQ+ folks and kids to be well,” she said. “Legislation matters, school matters, families matter, faith communities matter. All of these things matter to make youth mental health better.”

Gandy said she’s already seeing the impact of restrictive laws, such as House Bill 2007, which the West Virginia Legislature made law earlier this year and significantly limits access to gender-affirming care for anyone under the age of 18.

“I’ve seen literal families packing up and moving. It’s not just with kids, even though that law was for kids, it’s also with adults, because they’re fearful about coming out,” Gandy said. “They’re fearful about the repercussions that they might face. They’re also trying to plan for the inevitable with what next year’s legislation might cut, they might limit adult access to gender affirming care.”

For the first time this year, The Trevor Project survey asked respondents to describe a world where all LGBTQ people are accepted. Key phrases that popped up repeatedly included things like, “people just exist,” and “basic human rights.”

Gandy said she does see a path forward for those who want to support LGBTQ children and youth.

“Youth need caring, supportive adults. It doesn’t matter if they’re heterosexual and cisgender or if they’re LGBTQ+, they just need caring and supportive adults and LGBTQ youth need adults to support them in their sexual orientation, their gender identity,” she said. “That’s something that is relatively easy to do for adults, but somehow they still find it difficult to do because of their own biases and their own belief systems that they haven’t updated with new information.”

According to Gandy, there is a particularly easy action anyone can take to show their support of LGBTQ youth.

“One of the simplest ways that we can show that LGBTQ+ youth matter is visibility because it is, it can be an invisible minority status,” she said. “We can show visibility, visible support through rainbow flags, the pride progress flag, the trans flag — those really do actually mean a lot when kids see that and it just automatically communicates to them that you’re a safe person.”

U.S. Supreme Court Declines To Enforce State’s Trans Youth Sports Ban

West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey last month petitioned the high court to allow the ban to stay in effect while a challenge worked its way through the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to enforce a state law that prohibits transgender youth from participating in school sports.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court declined to do that, without explaining why. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented.

West Virginia lawmakers passed the “Save Women’s Sports Act” in 2021. A transgender student in Harrison County challenged the law, with Lambda Legal, a national LGBTQ rights law firm, and the ACLU of West Virginia.

A U.S. District Judge in Charleston allowed the law to take effect in January, but the Fourth Circuit put it on hold once again.

The conservative Alliance Defending Freedom petitioned the Supreme Court with Morrisey, who this week announced a run for governor.

In a statement Thursday, he said he was “deeply disappointed.”

W.Va. Governor Signs Ban On Gender-Affirming Care

West Virginia Republican Gov. Jim Justice on Wednesday signed a bill banning gender-affirming care for minors, joining at least 10 other states that have enacted laws restricting or outlawing medically supported treatments for transgender youth.

The bill outlaws those under 18 from being prescribed hormone therapy and fully reversible puberty blockers. It also bans minors from receiving gender-affirming surgery, something physicians say doesn’t even happen in West Virginia.

Unlike measures passed in other states, however, West Virginia’s law contains a unique exemption: It permits doctors to prescribe medical therapy if a teenager is considered at risk for self-harm or suicide.

Under the law, which will take effect in January 2024, a patient can be prescribed puberty blockers and hormone therapy after receiving parental consent and a diagnosis of severe gender dysphoria from two clinicians, including a mental health provider or an adolescent medicine specialist.

Both practitioners must be trained to diagnose and treat young people with severe gender dysphoria and provide written testimony that medical interventions are necessary to prevent or limit possible or actual self-harm.

The provisions were added at the urging of Senate Majority Leader Tom Takubo, who is a physician.

“These kids struggle. They have incredible difficulties,” the Republican said on the Senate floor earlier this month. Takubo cited more than a dozen peer-reviewed studies showing a decrease in rates of suicide ideation and attempts among youth with severe gender dysphoria who had access to medication therapy.

Gender dysphoria is defined by medical professionals as severe psychological distress experienced by those whose gender identity differs from their sex assigned at birth.

The bill also prohibits minors from being prescribed hormone therapy before the age of puberty, something West Virginia physicians say doesn’t happen anyway.

The medication dosage for any adolescent must be the lowest possible necessary to “treat the psychiatric condition and not for purposes of gender alteration,” according to the bill.

The West Virginia law comes as Republican lawmakers across the U.S. have pursued several hundred proposals this year to push back on LGBTQ+ rights, particularly rights for transgender residents, including banning transgender girls from girls sports, keeping transgender people from using restrooms in line with their gender identities and allowing or requiring schools to deadname trans students.

Lawmakers in West Virginia and other states moving to enact bans on transgender health care for youth and young adults often characterize gender-affirming treatments as medically unproven, potentially dangerous in the long term and a symptom of “woke” culture.

Every major medical organization, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychiatric Association, supports gender-affirming care for youths.

A 2017 study by UCLA Law’s The Williams Institute estimated West Virginia had the highest per capita rate of transgender youth in the country.

The rate of suicide ideation, or having suicidal thoughts or ideas, for transgender youth in West Virginia is three times higher than the rate for all youth in the state, according to West Virginia Youth Risk Behavior Survey data.

Natalie Frazier, who oversees gender-affirming care for Planned Parenthood in North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia, said the bill Justice signed Wednesday was “better than it could have been.”

“But it’s still unnecessary — just an unnecessary barrier to care that is going to end up harming people,” she said, adding that not every child’s family will have the resources to travel to two different clinicians for a gender dysphoria diagnosis.

Frazier, who is also a certified nurse midwife, said the diagnosis of severe gender dysphoria with risk of suicide “could probably apply to just about any kid getting access to gender-affirming care.”

“That’s why people are are so invested in providing the care because there is a disproportionate risk,” she said. “That’s something that any of these kids could be at risk for and nobody’s going into this care lightly.”

West Virginia’s ban also includes exemptions for people who are born intersex and for people taking treatments for infection, injury, disease or disorder that has been “caused by or exacerbated by the performance of gender transition procedures.”

Surgeries can be performed if a child is at risk for “imminent danger of death or impairment of a major bodily function.”

At least 11 states have now enacted laws restricting or banning gender-affirming care for minors: Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee, Utah, South Dakota and West Virginia. Federal judges have blocked enforcement of laws in Alabama and Arkansas, and nearly two dozen states are considering bills this year to restrict or ban care.

Lawmakers Approve Gender-Affirming Health Care Ban, With Exception

House Bill 2007 was the last bill taken up on the floor of the Senate Friday night, and was amended to provide an option to healthcare providers and families.

The House of Delegates passed an amended version of House Bill 2007 Saturday that restricts gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth, but carves out an exception for some treatment.

Late Saturday, the Senate voted 30-2 to give the bill its final approval.

HB 2007 bans gender-confirmation surgeries for minors, which experts have said are rare or nonexistent in West Virginia and other states. The House last month passed a version with no exceptions for hormone therapies and puberty blockers.

However, the Senate amended the bill Friday night to create a narrow path for minors to receive such treatment, with the endorsement of doctors and parents.

On Saturday, the House approved the amended bill on a vote of 88-10.

Del. Ric Griffith, D-Wayne, spoke in favor of the amendment and the bill.

“And like I said, you know, I think about this, and the votes we take on this will show up next November. But I keep thinking which is more important. These children, or how we’re perceived by our voters, and the lives of these children, are critical for us to protect and this is a very narrow allowance for there to be an exception when the medical profession believes it’s in the best interests of preventing a suicide for these young people, so I urge adoption of the amendment.”

The amendment followed testimony from doctors, parents, counselors and religious leaders who spoke against the bill, followed by a protest Thursday at the Capitol by LGBTQ rights groups.

Regardless of medical or parental opinion, HB 2007 has been hotly contested since the early days of the session and has sparked public hearings, rallies and lengthy floor discussions.

The bill originated with the purpose of banning gender affirming surgery for minors, something that medical experts testified in committee meetings is almost never done, and was later amended to include all forms of hormone therapy for minors as well.

House Bill 2007 was the last bill taken up on the floor of the Senate Friday night, and was amended to provide an option to healthcare providers and families. One complaint about the bill is that lawmakers didn’t listen to experts in the field when it was drafted, making some doctors on the relevant committees uncomfortable.

Senate Majority Leader Sen. Tom Takubo, R-Kanawha, who is a doctor, introduced an amendment to allow hormone treatment under certain circumstances when a person has a sense of unease because of a mismatch between their biological sex and their gender identity, a condition known as gender dysphoria.

“Patients with severe gender dysphoria, which is an extreme psychological illness, these kids struggle, they have incredible difficulties,” Takubo said. “What the section did was gave very strict guardrails so that the rest of the bill was left alone that talked about not being able to use the medicines just to create all these external changes, but instead it says that they can only be used in very specific situations.”

First, two distinct medical professionals, one specializing in mental health, must diagnose an individual with gender dysphoria. Second, the medical professionals must give a written opinion that hormonal therapy is medically necessary. Third, the patient’s parents or guardians, as well as the patient’s primary care provider, must all agree in writing that hormone treatment is the best course of action and finally, only the minimum level of hormones to treat the condition may be used.

Takubo went on to cite 17 peer-reviewed studies to dissuade concerns that hormonal therapy is not supported by the data. He began with a study in the New England Journal of Medicine, which he called, “almost one of the Bibles of medical studies.”

“What they did is they tested early treatment versus trying to wait because that’s the question, ‘What if we just wait till they’re adults to do this?’ When you wait, and the patient is already suffering from severe psychological psychosis, the incidence of depression was markedly higher,” Takubo said.

He went on to highlight the statistical significance of early treatment for gender dysphoria.

“The p value for the changes of what it did in severe depression, it had a p value of .001. If this was a surgery or cancer treatment, there would be no question,” Takubo said.

Sen. Mike Maroney, R-Marshall, also a doctor and the chair of the Senate Health and Human Resources Committee, stood in favor of the bill and extended Takubo’s comparison to cancer treatment.

“If it was a chemotherapy drug for lung cancer, you change the treatment the next day because it works better. But because it’s something we don’t quite understand, legislators can step in and tell experts across the nation and the world how to treat 30 patients that have a psychiatric condition,” Maroney said. “That is such a bad precedent to set.”

Several Senators, including Sen. Mark Maynard, R-Wayne, and Sen. Eric Tarr, R-Putnam, stood to oppose the amendment. Sen. Mike Azinger, R-Wood, provided the most animated opposition to the amendment. He said the nature of gender was “self-evident” and that giving children hormones to change their sex was “self-evidently” wrong. Azinger quoted a speech by Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves about “a dangerous movement sweeping across America today.”

“It’s trying to convince our children that they are in the wrong body. This dangerous movement attempts to convince these children that they’re just a surgery away from happiness. It threatens our children’s innocence and it threatens their health,” Azinger read.

“It’s self-evident that you do not, you do not chop up a child just try to prove that you can change their sex. You do not interrupt the natural course of childhood, growing into a young person by blocking their puberty, the natural course of events,” Azinger concluded.

Woelfel stood in favor of the bill and the amendment, and pointed out the irony that Senators who just minutes before had spoken about protecting children from predators would now go against science proven to protect children’s healthcare.

“Moments ago by vote of 32 to 1 this body decided that 16 and 17 year old kids with their parents could make a major life altering decision to get married,” Woelfel said. “I just can’t fathom that some legislator would want to get in the middle of that doctor – patient, parent – child relationship.”

Woelfel also pointed out that similar bills in Alabama and Arkansas were found to be either partially or wholly unconstitutional.

The amendment passed 20 to 12, with two Senators absent.

Sen. Patricia Rucker, R-Jefferson, also proposed an amendment that would establish reporting requirements for the prescription of “gender altering medication.” The amendment was deemed to not be germane to the bill and was dismissed.

The Senate’s final vote to pass the amended bill was 30 to 2, with two Senators absent. Sen. Mike Caputo, D-Marion, and Sen. Robert Plymale, D-Wayne, were the two votes against the bill.