With a federal judge having struck down the Arkansas ban on administering gender-affirming care to trans youth — the first such law in what would become an avalanche — the first domino has fallen in what will ideally be the end of these bans.
These bans are rooted in a set of false pretexts, ones that have been seeded and fomented by critics in bad faith: that gender-affirming care for young trans people is very easily obtainable, experimental, always has permanent consequences and is often regretted.
In truth, medical interventions from surgeries to hormone therapies have been practiced and studied for decades, getting them often requires multiple steps and a good deal of persistence, treatments like puberty blockers are physically reversible and the rate of regret for receiving this care is vanishingly small, about 1% on average.
