I think this is a critically important piece and that we should continue to add more and more nuance to this conversation. I would share that I don't think despair is necessarily linked to determinist and binary notions of gender.

When we think about criminalizing care for trans youth - which is what states are currently trying to do - the efforts are intimately connected to codifying notions of irreversibility and constraining bodily self-determination.
This is why we see bills both criminalize care for trans youth while permitting surgical intervention on intersex infants to "normalize" their bodies in alignment with binary constructions of sexed difference.
Many of the newly introduced state bills also mandate disclosure by school staff to parents and guardians of any trans or questioning young person thus chilling the ability of young people to safely explore their identities and bodies.
Despair is tied not only to forcibly having treatment cutoff and the state criminalizing transition but also in losing self-determination. Many young people who are accessing medical care do not (and will not) have binary identities.
It is in fact the ability to alter and claim our bodies that ultimately destabilizes the notion that our bodies are fixed at birth as clearly male or female in binary and coherent ways.
If these bills pass kids will die. It is impossible to deny that. But we will all suffer because we will continue to entrench the myth that how we engage with and affirm our bodies and identities is somehow about what is and is not reversible.
I hope in the future we might abandon notions of (ir)reversibility in favor of appreciating the multitudes that exist within each of us and across the human experience.
The more we can understand the intimate relationship between joy and despair and the false binary of reversibility and irreversibility, the more we might celebrate our non-linear journeys within and in connection to our bodies.

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