Gina’s family has their house on the market with plans to move from Tennessee to Minnesota. They hope it will sell before their teen’s hormone therapy and puberty blockers run out.
On May 31, Vanderbilt University Pediatric Transgender Clinic sent an email to Gina letting her know that her 15-year-old transgender teen son would no longer be able to get a refill for his prescriptions, as of the next day. Earlier in the year, her younger son, who is also trans, had his first appointment at the clinic canceled. It’s all due to a Tennessee law passed this year.
“Your current medication prescription is affected by the laws coming into effect regarding gender affirming care,” the email reads.
“I have a lot of families all panicking, including myself,” says Gina, whose name we’ve changed to protect her privacy. “We thought we had until July 1. Everything was timed out to get as much as we could. But they’ve already canceled that.”
Despite pending lawsuits, right-wing activists have gotten their way. Gender-affirming care for trans youth in Tennessee has become unavailable. Earlier this year, the Tennessee General Assembly passed legislation that puts doctors at risk of losing their licenses for providing gender-affirming care to minors. It was a return on a promise legislators made at an October anti-trans rally hosted by right-wing media figure Matt Walsh, who launched his own attack on the VUMC clinic via Twitter weeks earlier, and was backed by Gov. Bill Lee. The legislation was set to take effect July 1 and would require trans youth currently receiving gender-affirming care to end that care within nine months. The ACLU of Tennessee and others, including a Nashville family, filed a lawsuit to block the legislation in April, and the Department of Justice made an attempt to block the law as well.
(In 2022, Alabama was the first state to make providing gender-affirming medical treatment a felony. Like in Tennessee, the U.S. Department of Justice promptly challenged the law, and eventually a judge ruled to allow hormones and puberty blockers but not surgeries. Alabama also has a similar ongoing lawsuit.)
“I don’t begrudge them because they took excellent care of my kids, but it is very frustrating,” Gina says of VUMC. “We had like 24 hours’ notice that they were canceling all medications, and we weren’t told that that was going to happen ahead of time.”
VUMC suspended gender-affirming surgeries for transgender youth beginning in October. Before putting the practice on hold, the clinic also confirmed that it performed only about five surgeries per year on minors age 16 or older, and none of them were genital surgeries. The clinic has been largely silent on the matters, though quietly disabled the clinic’s website sometime in February or March of this year, as indicated by internet database the Wayback Machine. VUMC declined to comment further beyond a statement that reads: “We continue to fully comply with all federal and state laws and are carefully following the legal proceedings challenging the constitutionality of Tennessee’s new law.”
Gina tells the Scene that the clinic prefers at least a year of mental health work before becoming a patient there, including letters from mental health professionals and pediatricians. Appointments were always three months apart, she says.
“What we were always instructed was that surgeries were something that we would talk about 18-plus,” she says. “It was never offered. It was never suggested.”
Gina leads a support group for Tennessee families with transgender kids, and she says some parents are going as far as Asheville, N.C., and Carbondale, Ill., to receive care now. Others are also contemplating moving, or sending their children to live with family out of state.
“When my kids started getting care, it was like light came back into them and into their life and our family and everything,” she says. “As soon as things started to change again, and it’s taken away, we are back to self-harm and depression.”
Gina’s family is against the clock, hoping to get their younger son access to gender-affirming care before puberty hits and gender dysphoria worsens further. She hopes the law will turn around by the time some of the younger transgender children in her group come of age. The group is in contact with about 90 families, and just about as many signed up at Franklin Pride, she says.
“I don’t want to feel like I’m leaving anybody,” she says. “It was kind of bittersweet. I want to stay and fight, but at the same time, my kids have had to fight for this many years already, and they shouldn’t have to.”
Plus we chat with hometown queen Aura Mayari and delve into the history of Play
