YWCA Greater Cleveland strongly denounces recent statements and legislation that label gender-affirming medical care child abuse. Gender-affirming medical care can be lifesaving for transgender and gender expansive people of any age, who already face extreme medical, legislative, and societal barriers to receiving this care. These orders and legislations successfully fuel transphobia in governments, workplaces, schools, and communities across the country. Additionally, they stigmatize and endanger transgender youth and their families by setting an extremely harmful precedent for future legislation.

Further, we reject these statements’ unacceptable comparison of important medical care to historical sterilization of Black women, young women, and disabled women. This not only vilifies important medical care that allows transgender people of all ages to safely express their chosen gender, but dismisses the traumatic experiences of women in states that have never sought to fully redress its deeply rooted history of eugenics. 

YWCA Greater Cleveland recognizes our responsibility to confront injustice wherever we see it to ensure a truly empowered country and community. We stand in solidarity with transgender people of all ages and those working to ensure widespread, safe access lifesaving gender-affirming medical care. Transgender people of any age deserve true inclusion and safe access to medical care and urgently need our support to ensure it. We all have a personal responsibility in creating a trans-inclusive community. We can an all advocate for the full inclusion of transgender women of color in every part of our community; to family, friends, and in all personal networks.

Access Until Transgender Justice…Just Is to advocate for and arm yourself with knowledge about transgender and gender expansive people in our communities.