“I guess I’m just going to Meridian, then a little farther,” she said. A year earlier, Alabama lawmakers had passed one of the country’s first bans, but a judge had temporarily blocked the legislation, which meant teenagers could still get hormones there, at least for now. The best option, she decided, was a tenuous one. She didn’t have vacation time or hotel money to spare, so the Midwest was out. Nearly every state within 700 miles had banned gender-affirming care for minors, and a trip to Illinois would have taken three days. Initially, Katie didn’t know where to go. (Katie and her family spoke to The Washington Post on the condition that they be identified by only their first names out of concern they could face legal consequences.) She didn’t understand the particulars, and she didn’t know what would happen to her if she broke it, but she cared less about penalties than she did about Ray, and so, the day the ban passed, she decided she’d do anything to keep her son well. She knew that Mississippi’s law contained a rare aid-and-abet clause that prohibited adults from helping a minor transition. Mississippi passed a law in late February banning transgender minors from accessing gender-transition treatments. “It says we’ll be there by 11:48,” she said. Katie couldn’t afford to move, and she needed a solution faster than the courts could offer, so she’d settled on a cheaper, quicker plan: She’d take a day off from her nursing job, and she and Ray would travel out of state for his medical care. Some uprooted their lives in red states for the promise of protections in blue ones. The ban would take that happiness away.Īcross the country, families were doing everything they could to protect their trans children. Testosterone had allowed her son to embody himself for the first time. Conservative lawmakers said they’d pushed the bills to protect young people, but Katie felt like they’d done the opposite. By mid-spring, nearly half the country had passed similar bills, according to the Movement Advancement Project, and now, 1 in 3 trans children lives in a state with a ban. Two months earlier, Mississippi had banned transgender young people, like Ray, from accessing hormones or other gender-transition treatments. Katie looked at her boy, a thin 17-year-old with wavy hair and an easy grin, and she asked herself the question that had begun to matter least: Was she breaking the law? Would they make it by noon for Ray’s telehealth appointment? Would the pharmacy give him testosterone? She’d finally found a destination in Thomasville, a rural town nearly 200 miles from their suburban Mississippi home, but much remained unclear. She’d researched how to change a tire, and she’d spent hours on Google Maps, searching for the closest Walgreens in Alabama. She’d asked a relative to pick up her two younger boys from school. Katie had done all she could to prepare for this trip. “I’ll play once we get closer,” she told Ray. She couldn’t make out anything in the distance. She looked for turtles as she pulled her SUV onto the highway around 9 one morning in early May, but her eyes went blurry with fear. Anyone who spotted an animal racked up points, though the exact number depended on the species and an in-the-moment car vote. They talked more than they listened to music, and they played a game they called Nature. Like any family, Katie and her son Ray had their road trip staples. Deep Reads features The Washington Post’s best immersive reporting and narrative writing.
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