Kentucky anti-trans bill impacts intersex kids, forces gender choice

By FYH News Team

Published on March 6, 2023

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Emory Hufbauer is a UK graduate, former Louisville high school teacher, and an intersex person and activist. They work as a research programmer in a biology lab, and their pronouns are they / them.

When I was a child, I was coerced into procedures that used hormones, surgery and psychological manipulation to permanently change my sex and gender characteristics against my will. I survived, but the physical scars and emotional trauma will leave me in pain for the rest of my life. HB 470 – the so-called “Do No Harm Bill” which passed the Kentucky House last week – would make such violent treatment of children explicitly legal, or even mandatory under the law. As an intersex Kentuckian, I oppose HB 470 in the strongest terms.

It’s almost impossible to write a law relating to the medical care of trans people without also impacting the lives of intersex people like me, who are born with natural differences of chromosomes, hormones or sex characteristics and are often neither male nor female. Indeed, intersex and trans people’s experiences mirror each other in many ways – in some sense, intersex people are born into a space like that which trans people cross as they transition. Data on intersex people is difficult to collect, and there are many different kinds of intersex variations, but together we might represent up to 1.7% of the population.

More:Kentucky House advances bill to ban gender transition services for trans youths

How HB 470 impacts intersex children of Kentucky

It was inevitable, then, that HB470 would target intersex, as well as trans kids. But the way the bill does so is far more telling than it is accidental. Like most such bills, HB 470 includes a clumsy but deliberate loophole designed to prevent it from doing what intersex activists like me have been demanding for years – to ban cosmetic surgeries on the genitals of intersex infants. If it had been in place when I was a child, this bill would have failed to protect me from the terrible, purposeless damage that was done to my body in the name of assigning me a binary gender. In fact, under this loophole HB 470 explicitly permits such devastating procedures. If the goal of this bill is to prevent harm, why does it avoid protecting intersex children?

Other provisions of this bill, however, aren’t necessarily subject to that loophole – for example those which restrict the bodily autonomy of intersex children in ways that could force their medical providers to cause them permanent harm: With the nature of my medical status as an intersex person, I must take hormone therapy for many reasons, including foremost my skeletal integrity. As a teen it was doubly so, but my body reacted dangerously to the HRT I was forced to take. Switching to a different hormone – with my informed consent – would have been the safest treatment option, but that option was unavailable to me and I had no choice but to wait until adulthood, accepting the harm which that caused. Under HB 470, a better option could be not just unavailable, but illegal.

And of course, when it comes to the provision of the bill which allows for individuals who feel they were harmed by gender-related care to sue their childhood providers for reparations decades later, intersex people are left out again. Under HB 470, someone who briefly, with knowledge of the risks, took hormone blockers as a teenager and then suffers from most-likely unrelated fertility issues decades later could sue their former provider for millions. But someone like me, who was forcibly sterilized just for being intersex, would still have no recourse. This bill fails to protect children, fails to secure their medical rights and fails to allow them to seek justice as adults.

And moreover, this bill would use the force of law to stop anyone who would try to help a child like the one I was. Although the new wording of the bill is unclear, any organization that supports or affirms a young person in exploring gender traits other than those allowed for them by law could be banned from public funding or even delicensed. If I had asked my doctors to refer to me by my correct pronouns, they could have been legally required to refuse under HB 470. When my therapist pushed me to wear more gendered clothes and change my voice, and told me I was “misunderstanding myself” for questioning my assigned gender, she was doing what she might be legally required to do to preserve her license under HB 470.

I was surrounded by hostility, but under this bill, trans and intersex teens reaching out for help would be denied in every possible way – even when surrounded by people who would uphold their free will and bodily autonomy; even over the personal judgment of their parents, teachers and therapists, the medical judgment of their doctors, the actuarial judgment of their insurance and their own self-determination as human beings.

The Original Bill:New, sweeping anti-trans bill being fast-tracked in Kentucky legislature

How California tried to help intersex and transgender youth

Years ago, in another state where I once faced abuse, there was another bill that shared a name with HB 470 – CA 2021-SB 225 “Do No Harm.” It too claimed to protect children, but where HB 470 is slick with ill-intention, that bill was pure, and so I supported it. SB 225 would have protected me. And it would have allowed trans and intersex teens to make decisions about their own medical care when they were ready.

I’ll say again what I said then: When a young person with an outwardly binary-conforming body comes forward and asks for treatment with surgery and hormones to confirm their gender identity, they have already traversed an incredible array of barriers to ask for help − their free will is plainly evident in their choice to speak up, even in the face of the enormous pressure society puts on them to conform. But for intersex children whose bodies diverge from the binary, that same pressure pushes them the other way.

Why then does HB 470 do the opposite of what is needed, restricting the free will of trans teens while leaving intersex infants vulnerable to the greatest extent possible, against all evidence that this will increase harm?

I’m reminded of something Kentucky Baptist Convention Executive Todd Gray said supporting HB 470: “We must help all children understand….that they are made in the image of God – intentionally created male or female.” I would like for Mr. Gray, and all supporters of this bill, to explain exactly what they mean by that. To me, and to every intersex person in this state.

HB 470 interferes with the relationship between young people and their caretakers at every level. It arbitrarily prescribes which medical procedures, hormones and even gender expressions are appropriate for which people, and it capriciously goes out of its way to avoid protecting intersex children. HB 470 is intended to hurt people, and calling it the “Do No Harm” bill is an offense and a hypocrisy.

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