NY Times: “Ever since Zara, a transgender girl, was 8, she has been certain she wanted to grow up to be a woman. After conversations with her parents and sessions with a therapist, she began transitioning socially: changing her name to Zara and pronouns to she/her. When she turned 9, she began treatment with puberty blockers, drugs that would place her physiological development in limbo until she was old enough — 14 according to her doctor — to begin estrogen therapy and develop a feminine body.
But last spring Arkansas enacted a law, the first of its kind in the nation, barring physicians from administering hormones or puberty blockers to transgender people younger than 18. The bill, called the Save Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act, overrode a veto by Gov. Asa Hutchinson and was to go into effect on July 28, about a month after Zara’s birthday. It is now on pause because of a legal challenge from the American Civil Liberties Union.
Zara has been able to get hormones while the court case proceeds, but worries about what the future holds. “I was just really happy, after finally waiting so long, to get something that I’ve needed for a very long time,” she said, sitting in her suburban backyard with her parents, Jasmine and Mo Banks, amid buzzing cicadas.
In recent years a growing number of American teenagers have come out as transgender and sought medical care to better align their bodies with their gender identities. Even as the medical community grapples with how best to provide such care, states across the country have introduced legislation banning it outright; medical groups have condemned these laws as dangerous.”