LEXINGTON, Ky. (LEX 18) — The Kentucky House and Senate passed a bill that some critics are calling "anti-LGBTQ". The legislation includes a ban on gender-affirming care for minors. Two LGBTQ advocates met at a Lexington library to discuss their continued concerns.
One advocate, Emma Curtis, says, "It was really shocking to see how quickly a lot of this legislation picked up traction this session."
The bill's sponsors, like Senator Lindsey Tichenor, shared concerns last week about what they believed not passing this bill would mean. She says, "We're talking about removing healthy body parts that you cannot put back on."
Curtis explains the gender-affirming care the trans community wants includes puberty blockers and hormone therapy — not surgery. As a transgender woman, she says she knows how difficult mental health battles among trans-youth can be. She worried about damage kids not having access to care can have.
"I was a 13-year-old closeted trans kid and quite frankly I dealt with suicidal ideation. You know, I hate having to talk about it but, you know, at one point in my life I attempted suicide and, you know, it wasn’t gender-affirming care that made me do that,” says Curtis.
Mason Chernoski, another advocate and transgender male, explains what not having access to medical care and support was like for him.
He says, "Your body isn’t the way you want it to look and every day it changes a little more and it looks a little less the way you want it to look. And a lot of teenagers don’t know how to cope with that."
Chernoski says the LGBTQ community will continue to work toward change and will be there to support youth. He says he gets that everyone might not understand why this is important to so many people, but he wants others to be willing to hear trans about experiences. He says, "It's hard to process it and that’s okay. It’s okay to not understand my experience, it's okay to not, to not know what all this means."
Curtis wants people to remember who transgender youth and the trans community are.
She says, "They aren’t the largest population of people, we aren’t the largest population of people, but we are people."
These advocates say they'll continue to work toward a change in the Commonwealth.
