On April 5th, 2023, the Florida state senate passed Senate Bill 254 at a 27-12 vote. What Senate Bill 254 does is allow for the state government to, in essence, capture and forcibly detransition children who have undergone any form of gender-affirming medical care. Because of this, I am no longer able to enter the state of Florida. I am no longer able to enter the state of Florida without being stolen, ripped from the medical care that is the reason I and many others are still alive. To go along with that, students in Florida are no longer allowed to learn about LGBTQ+ people or discuss them in any sense. Ron DeSantis’s infamous ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill forbids the teaching of LGBTQ+ topics throughout all of school, cutting out the history of millions of Americans.

Florida  isn’t the only one of its kind. Across the country, gender-affirming treatments (hormone blockers, estradiol patches, testosterone patches, etc.) are being banned for minors, such as in Idaho and Indiana, where they are banned outright, even for adults. The excuse routinely parroted for this is ‘protecting children’; the same reason that drag queens are also now being banned from performing in front of minors in many states. On March 2nd, 2023, Tennessee Governor Lee signed a bill that completely banned drag performances in public spaces.

The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as any attempt to destroy or erase any sub-group of society. The actions a group can take to commit genocide include the obvious: mass extermination, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. But it also outlines two other paths of genocide:

Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part

These are not arguably what could be happening to transgender individuals in modern America. This is what is happening. No hypotheticals, no possibilities. This is real. According to a study performed by Iran J Public Health Organization, the mean score of happiness among transgender individuals post-gender-affirming care increased drastically, and the ideas and applications of these treatments have existed since 1919 at the Berlin Institute of Sexology, and even long before in more archaic manners. \.

To ignore this, to dismiss this, is to ally with those who act against innocent people simply trying to live. This is a genocide in the making, growing slowly until it reaches full potential. We’ve ignored the signs before. We cannot ever again.