This petition is to demand an end to the discriminatory, exclusionary, and prohibitive recommendations made by the Florida Department of Health about gender affirming care for youth.

The Florida Department of Health released a statement to healthcare professionals on the morning of 4.20.2022 titled “Treatment of Gender Dysphoria for Children and Adolescents.”  This email is in retaliation to the federal release of a fact sheet titled “Gender-Affirming Care and Young People.” The prohibitive guidelines limiting social transition and medical interventions for Trans youth and adolescents are harmful to transgender, nonbinary, and gender expansive youth in the state of Florida. Though this email shares “guidelines” rather than expresses policy, it is a form of fear mongering that has the potential to affect the decisions of healthcare providers to provide and advocate on behalf of their patients and clients who are transgender, nonbinary, and gender expansive youth, thereby creating a culture that excludes viable and life saving treatments. It is also a form of foreshadowing that legislation prohibiting gender affirming care for youth is on the way unless a clear message is sent that the people of Florida will not stand for this mistreatment of a vulnerable population.

The recommendations made in this email to healthcare providers suggests that life saving gender affirming care should be withheld from youth on the basis of “one study” published in 2015; this same study has been used to support anti-trans legislation across the US, despite a plethora of contrary and more recent medical and mental health studies. The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) standards of Care version 7 include evidence based best practices that establish clear guidelines for affirming care of transgender, nonbinay, and gender expansive youth; these are the guidelines medical professionals refer to in order to best serve transgender, nonbinary, and gender expansive youth. This email is exemplary of the culture war being waged against people who are transgender and has the unfortunate potential to cause grave harm to transgender, nonbinary, and gender expansive youth in Florida by encouraging healthcare professionals to withhold life saving medical care and social support or be in violation of state guidelines.   The American Medical Association sent a letter in April, 2021 to the National Governors Association calling efforts such as this "a dangerous intrusion into the practice of medicine" also stating that “Decisions about medical care belong within the sanctity of the patient-physician relationship,” the AMA wrote in its letter. “As with all medical interventions, physicians are guided by their ethical duty to act in the best interest of their patients and must tailor recommendations about specific interventions and the timing of those interventions to each patient’s unique circumstances. Such decisions must be sensitive to the child’s clinical situation, nurture the child’s short and long-term development, and balance the need to preserve the child’s opportunity to make important life choices autonomously in the future. We believe it is inappropriate and harmful for any state to legislatively dictate that certain transition-related services are never appropriate and limit the range of options physicians and families may consider when making decisions for pediatric patients.”

Please sign this petition to support Trans youth and to ensure that physicians and parents keep the right to make decisions about Trans youth health and future.  Our Trans youth deserve to be supported, loved and given all opportunity to receive the medical care they need.