Trans teens have something to say
The Trump administration might not want trans kids to exist, but they’re living their lives anyway.
by Jun 3, 2026, 11:00 AM UTC
By the time the Children’s Hospital closed its doors to trans patients, Sage had already stopped taking testosterone. A nonbinary high school student, they originally received treatment for the rapid onset of puberty. The changes their body experienced felt frightening and sudden. They developed PMOS, a relatively common hormonal disorder that can lead to hair growth and irregular periods. The pandemic didn’t help. Too much time to focus on scrutinizing the person in the mirror while doomscrolling. Their doctor first prescribed puberty blockers to help with their PMOS symptoms — not explicitly for trans-related reasons — and eventually recommended they take testosterone to help with hormonal imbalances. Figuring out their gender came later. “Overall, my story was just I decided to attempt suicide and then that’s the only way that my parents took me seriously,” Sage says. “Which is sadly the case with a lot of trans people. They have to go to an extreme to be recognized.”
Kids are hardly supposed to be seen or heard in our society, especially trans ones. At a protest I attended last year, trans kids’ voices were centered in all their corny, beautiful, galaxy-brain words. In most spaces, however, it is the adults who get the last word. Why do we insist on hearing more from the parents and legislators than the actual children whose lives are at stake? Stories that aim to whip up panic about an alleged boom in trans kids gaining medical resources often only interview people with no firsthand knowledge of transness, infantilizing kids as naive or unreliable narrators. Sage’s story is just one in a chorus; many trans kids are struggling to have their voices heard. Few newspaper or magazine features have given space to the words and lived experiences of trans kids living under the Trump administration. “I had a lot of trans friends online or people that I used to know who were trans and did not make it,” Sage says. This troubled and difficult relationship to transition is often the kind of story people associate with coming out.
Now 17, Sage ended up getting care through the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, which specialized in the relationship between gender, hormonal imbalances, and mental health. This care appealed to Sage as they sorted through their identity and their PMOS symptoms. Eventually, they decided to stop taking testosterone. Navigating care at the hospital was relatively easy. Their life opened up. They met a trans girl named Brooklyn in their high school marching band and the two started dating. Brooklyn’s coming out was less intense than Sage’s: She told her family she wanted to start taking estrogen after she began to experience dysphoria. Her parents understood, and Brooklyn got on hormones soon after.
“We’re teenagers, for God’s sake”
For many children in liberal cities, things were going relatively well. At least until last summer, when the Trump administration began to threaten the funding of hospitals that provided trans healthcare for kids. Around this time, Sage logged into a therapy session with a psychiatrist only to be told that the hospital would no longer be treating patients like them. There was no attempt to provide continuity of care and no suggestion of where else to turn. Kaiser Permanente, one of the largest providers of healthcare for trans people in California, paused providing surgical pediatric trans care. (In a statement, Kaiser Permanente spokesperson Hilary Costa said, “after significant deliberation and consultation with internal and external experts, we made the difficult decision to suspend surgical gender-affirming care for patients under the age of 19 in our hospitals and surgical centers.”) Since then, finding someone else who can navigate hormones and mental health has been a nightmare. Some parents, like Sage’s, are supportive. Others, less so. Without proper medical care, some kids have been forced to temporarily detransition — at least physically — until turning 18, 19, or 21, depending on the state’s current rules.
Sage couldn’t even continue seeing their doctor for PMOS-related care. Brooklyn also had to look elsewhere for care. Sage even knew a doctor who lost their job after the Children’s Hospital shuttered its pediatric trans care unit. (The Children’s Hospital did not respond to a request for comment.) The hospital cited potential funding issues, worried if it kept its gender clinic open it’d lose federal funding for its other services. Others may find hormone replacement therapy (HRT, as it is known, referring to testosterone and estrogen) through less official sources. Neither is a foolproof option.
Some kids like Sage and Brooklyn worry about the rapid rise of anti-trans sentiment. Not even in North Hollywood, where both members of the T4T couple reside, are they safe from teasing and victimization. “It just looks different than most people would describe,” Sage says. Some people even record themselves bullying trans teens and post it online. Others are harder on trans people who don’t pass than those who do. “I’ve had adult parents come up to me or my friends saying, ‘Oh, you’re trans, but you don’t look the part.’ Adults commenting on children’s bodies because they don’t look like the gender they’re trying to portray,” Sage groans.
As their own mental health frays, trans people may even end up bullying each other. Some trans kids use derogatory terms like trooning or pooning to refer to trans kids who don’t pass or meet strict beauty standards. It’s a symptom of self-loathing and internalized transphobia, Sage and Brooklyn tell me. This is a generation that’s had both more access to trans culture and more national scrutiny than ever before. That’s a lot to handle, something that Sage worries can create a hostile environment for all involved. “Sometimes it feels like everyone’s against each other,” they say. “I think a lot of it too is that transphobia is such a loud voice in discourse today that inevitably so many people are going to eventually hear it — even in the most accepting of places — and start to empathize with it,” Brooklyn adds.
Sage worries that few people are thinking about the effect HRT has on mental health. Not just as a way of keeping suicidal ideation at bay, but also in terms of balancing hormone levels during the volatile teen years. Going off HRT can be disastrous — even more so at such a vulnerable time. “We’re teenagers, for God’s sake,” Sage says exasperatedly. Adolescents shouldn’t have to stage die-ins or go on radio shows to demand their rights. Sage wants doctors to give trans people autonomy because they deserve it, not just out of pity.
Children can and do know the cost of their desires. It is adults who try to simplify the jagged contours of adolescence. “It is bitter for the young to see what awful innocence adults grow into, that terrible vulnerability that must be sheltered from the rodent mire of childhood,” the novelist Katherine Dunn once wrote. Kids understand the joys and risks of transition, perhaps as well as anyone. For children, the ability to get care has always been fickle. Not every parent is supportive. Some of the adults I talked to split custody with co-parents who weren’t as accepting.
The world of childhood is not simply a safe space, even if it should be. It is a time of suffering, limitations, and walking around in the suburbs or city streets blasting emo songs and bubblegum pop in order to process big feelings. The fantasy of innocence serves only those who seek to restrict the rights of queer youth. For the rest of us, we prefer kids to thrive on their own terms rather than become accessories to their parents. In recent years, major features that speak to real trans people have slowed to a trickle — and I’ve hardly seen any outlets speak with trans kids. (Speaking out in support of trans care for youth may even be penalized soon by the FTC for “consumer fraud.”) In such a hostile climate, hearing from teenagers themselves felt like an important story that no one wanted to tell. After I put out the call to talk with trans youth, I met Sage and so many others. They’re a terrified, witty, angry, and resilient bunch who want to speak for themselves.
Instead of focusing solely on pitying trans people or writing depressing news stories, trans kids like Sage wish people wrote more about the positive side of the equation — community events and clothing swaps. Of course, Sage knows there aren’t as many clicks in those kinds of banal, optimistic stories. For them, laughter is a big part of survival. So is making plans for the future in spite of the horrors. They’re thinking of becoming a journalist.
Across the US, trans clinics treating children for gender dysphoria are closing. Alongside the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, UChicago Medicine in the Midwest and NYU Langone in New York all abruptly stopped treating kids even before being ordered to do so by the Trump administration. They are hardly the only hospitals to stop providing transition-related care for those under 18. Therapists have left clients in the lurch, doctors have stopped working in pediatrics, and parents have been left to pick up the pieces. Documentaries like 2025’s Just Kids chronicled a country on the brink — parents terrified of being labeled abusive by the state struggling to finance moves to more liberal states, only to now face the same obstacles at a national level. What are the options left for trans kids and their parents? HRT and surgery for trans youth have become practically outlawed. Across the country, trans kids have demanded a voice in response to these dire developments — at protests, in op-eds, online, and in person. They are far more scrappy, resourceful, intelligent, cynical, and determined than they’re given credit for by the mainstream media.
Trans teenagers are often skilled at advocating for their own care. In Los Angeles, Sage participated in protests after the Children’s Hospital closed. They were frustrated by the institution bowing down to pressure by the federal government to pull funding. In New York, I was at a rally for trans youth last February, shortly after NYU Langone first threatened to suspend care for children. I listened as women like Alaina Daniels and Rabbi Abby Stein spoke and ushered trans kids up the steps at Union Square to share their stories. The most powerful moment was when a trans kid belted “Defying Gravity” a cappella. It was not a song I had ever expected to be moved by.
“Every time I turn on social media or I hear someone talking about the news, it’s just another batshit insane thing”
Donald Trump built a platform on mocking trans people and saying Kamala Harris would give trans surgeries out like candy to incarcerated immigrants. Now in power, Trump is forcibly detransitioning inmates throughout the prison system. He routinely makes exaggerated claims about trans children like “there are some places your boy leaves the school, comes back a girl, without parental consent.” The reality is that even obtaining puberty blockers usually requires multiple meetings with doctors and therapists. In response to such rhetoric, one father of a trans teenager tells me, “If you trust doctors to take care of you when you’re sick, trust the doctors at a gender clinic.”
When a child comes out as trans, they typically meet with a psychiatrist multiple times in order to receive a diagnosis of gender dysphoria and “prove” they understand the gravity of taking hormones or going on puberty blockers. For children who have yet to go through puberty, blockers may be prescribed by a doctor. Typically, these medications pause puberty through the administration of regular shots or an implant that gets replaced every year. The effects are typically temporary and reversible — if someone stops taking the medication, their puberty resumes. Blockers are a very low-stakes first step that most practitioners require trans kids try out before they move on with their transition.
By contrast, hormone replacement therapy is usually given to those who have already been on blockers or are older and further along in the puberty process. HRT has some effects that may be irreversible, like hair growth for those taking testosterone or breast growth for those taking estrogen. Typically, testosterone is a shot, while estrogen can be injected or taken in a pill form. Most trans kids do not get surgery, though some transmasculine people may get top surgery (a kind of mastectomy to remove breast tissue).
Still, many have attempted to sensationalize trans medicine by fabricating reports in an attempt to fearmonger concerns about safety and the specter of detransition. But regret is rare. Certainly, some parents worry about the mental health of their kids both before and after transition. But for trans kids, this is lifesaving medicine. Suicidal ideation is a real risk for those who do not receive adequate care. The parents I spoke to were primarily the kinds of parents who advocate for their kids, but some parents do express fear before ultimately coming around and supporting their children’s transition. Certainly, it’s a big life step for anyone to take in a world consumed by transphobia. The stress alone can be a lot to handle even for families that end up being extremely empathetic. Most of the kids I spoke with ended up seeing doctors initially for mental health reasons. By the time the kids came out, their parents knew the stakes were high. Multiple high-stakes murders and suicides have occurred in the past few months alone, including the stabbing of Juniper Blessing at the University of Washington.
For a few years, the liberal rhetoric around trans care was that it would become a states’ rights issue. Kansas has invalidated the driver’s licenses of those who change their sex on their ID. Many mainstream news outlets have hardly covered these dire developments, though independent reporters like Erin Reed have been providing in-depth updates. In Texas, the parents of trans kids may be investigated for child abuse (though during the course of reporting this article, I didn’t talk to or hear about anyone who has faced such charges). A Williams Institute survey from 2024 found that nearly half of trans respondents had moved or were considering moving to more accepting states.
However, after NYU Langone and Mount Sinai told parents they would stop treating pediatric trans patients in February, left-leaning outlets like The Nation called on Mayor Zohran Mamdani to do something. How could it happen here? families seemed to wonder. How could these hospitals comply with Trump’s anti-trans policies before they even became law? The answer, of course, is based on economics, not morality. Trump has stated he will suspend federal funding for healthcare systems that treat trans minors. Still, the fight isn’t over. The ACLU has launched endless lawsuits, and in response to NYU Langone’s recent moves, the New York Attorney General’s office has ordered the hospital to resume care for trans kids, though they do not appear to have complied with her request. Despite multiple protests and rallies, NYU Langone has not given a comment since, beyond announcing it was being subpoenaed to release records of who it provided pediatric trans care to.
Elliot is another kid who got lucky. The 17-year-old grew up in Pennsylvania and both his grandma and father were accepting when he came out. They helped him get on testosterone and even find a surgeon to get top surgery. He was also one of the few kids I talked to who had an in-person community. He goes to a local trans guy meetup and attends events at a nearby queer bookstore. Having someone to talk to is critical — especially older role models who can help kids envision a future for themselves. “Seeing queer people in real life and seeing them as adults and living and being happy… that’s been awesome,” he says. But of course, he echoes, getting healthcare has been a battle. “Seeing my life turned into something that’s political is so frustrating,” he says. Mostly, Elliot wants to talk about practicalities.
When Penn State Health informed Elliot that it was going to be abruptly terminating care for trans youth, he was disappointed that instead of giving him real resources the hospital gave him the number of a suicide hotline. Now, that letter hangs on Elliot’s wall. He often turns official documents into collages to cope with the shock. A few weeks after being denied care, Elliot was given the chance to speak with Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro about the importance of providing gender-affirming care for youth. “It was worth a shot,” he says. “But I didn’t expect much.” He says the meeting went well and he’s been encouraged by some lawsuits the state has launched.
Elliot has found a way to continue to get trans-related care from a virtual outlet, though he’s glad he underwent top surgery when he did. The endless search for a doctor and the difficulties maintaining care in the current political climate have taken a toll. Elliot has friends who have had to stop taking hormones because their doctors refuse to see them. Like many, his mental health often dips in tandem with the onslaught of depressing news. He’s not out at school (often referred to as “going stealth”), so his bedroom has become a queer sanctuary for making art or hanging up flags. “Every time I turn on social media or I hear someone talking about the news, it’s just another batshit insane thing. There’s people in AP Gov class debating trans rights. As a 17-year-old, I feel like I can’t do anything about it.”
“Without HRT, I think I’m 99 percent sure I would be dead. I mean, it sounds stupid, but I think having access to the internet saved my life,” Elliot tells me. Facebook groups and support spaces like the TransFamilies Project were more of a resource for parents than kids, who sometimes were able to live in a bubble shielded from the news — preferring to play Roblox or Minecraft.
Alongside Elliot, only one of the other kids I spoke to had received top surgery. It is the only surgery that trans children are (or, perhaps, were) allowed to pursue. “It’s the same exact surgery that guys with gynecomastia get,” Elliot tells me. What Trump calls “gender mutilation surgery” is actually fairly routine. Yes, puberty is irreversible. But this is true for both trans kids and cis kids. You can’t turn back time and grow boobs — or not grow them, as the case may be. Such changes can be devastating for children who know themselves to be trans.
The misinformation surrounding trans care is endless. “A lot of people are too scared to talk about that because people hear about surgeries and minors and they kind of freak out,” Elliot says. “It’s not a huge surgery. It is a surgery, but I got keyhole. It is two one-inch incisions. They suck breast tissue and fat out. Then you have drains in for a week and then you take ’em out and after a month you’re back to being able to do pull-ups and stuff. It also wasn’t really painful. I took Tylenol for the first week.”
Many parents expressed their concern that some liberals advocate for trans medicine based on the idea that no one is getting any surgery. The truth is that a very small number of trans kids do end up undergoing some sort of procedure. “On the one hand, I understand what they’re saying is that the perceived problem of kids being given surgery as if it’s on a whim, that’s what they may be trying to combat,” one parent tells me. “But I have a kid and my kid did have surgery, and I’m often tempted to respond to say, ‘This does happen and it is a prolonged process.’ It was a multi-year process where [my child] saw multiple different doctors and multiple different therapists.” It is not a “frivolous” endeavor, he pointedly says. Another parent puts it this way when discussing his trans daughter: “There was no move or push to say, ‘Hey, we can also chop it off if you want.’ Nobody’s trying to get kids to do that.”
Elliot’s ability to navigate a collapsing system is his solution for the tough days ahead. Many kids are trying to take things one day at a time, terrified of the immense right-wing backlash to their desire to transition. A few of the kids I spoke to seemed nervous to talk to the press — it’s understandable considering how many bad-faith profiles of trans kids there have been.
It’s not transitioning itself that’s forcing these kids to grow up fast. It’s the vast amount of obstacles that force them to give up their carefree teenage years in favor of scrappy strategy and intense organization. The amount of life admin these children must do to meet their basic needs is astonishing. One father put it best: “When I was a freshman in college, I was a typical Long Island party boy. I was not able to manage health appointments online. I was not thinking about keeping up with my meds.”
Rebecca’s family is one of many who have relocated from Republican-led states in search of a more accepting environment. Before 15-year-old Rebecca came out, she was severely depressed and regularly having nightmares. She would sob through the night and dream about dying. “She was dying in a car or she would shoot herself or stab herself,” her mother says. “I just can’t stop picturing I’m burning up in this fire,” Rebecca would say. At the time, she didn’t know what “transgender” meant. She simply told her parents she felt like “being the other gender.” During our conversation, she often let them take the lead, saying she didn’t always remember how difficult her life was before transition. Some of the struggles she and her parents faced weren’t always that visible to her either. She’s one of the trans kids who’s grown up without having to think too much about being trans.
While her family has tried to protect her from some of the worst news about trans healthcare in the US, her parents have been keeping an eye on things. Her dad even has a backup plan in case they need to flee the country. He says he feels a weight and an obligation to keep up with the news — to make sure no sudden anti-trans policy blindsides them. “All of this is crazy,” Rebecca says quietly. “I don’t need hate stuff while I’m trying to doomscroll,” she jokes. “I’d rather just stay with my Pokémon video[s].”
While the internet can be a nightmare space for trans people, many of those I spoke with found community online. Many parents used Bluesky or popular blogs like Erin in the Morning to stay informed. Rebecca’s mother laughs before telling me that before her kids were born, she went to a tarot card reader and begged for a daughter. Now, she says, she has one. Protecting her is paramount.
Rebecca’s parents helped her obtain puberty blockers in sixth grade, and she started estrogen the summer before eighth. At the time, they lived in Dallas. Finding care for kids in Texas is “almost like there’s a secret society,” her mom tells me. Rebecca’s mother found the clinic they wound up briefly attending through a moms’ group on Facebook. After Rebecca started transitioning, her family started to experience some peace. “It was like all the weight had been lifted off her shoulders,” her mom says. Unfortunately, however, her daughter was one of the last patients the clinic admitted before closing its doors.
For a while, her family tried to make things work in Texas, and even hoped the state might become a friendlier place to trans kids. Rebecca’s father started driving to the Capitol in Austin to testify in favor of trans rights at the same time that Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton looked to code trans care as a form of child abuse. As far as they know, they haven’t been investigated by DHS or CPS, but they do know at least one family who CPS looked into. By the end of their time in Texas, Rebecca’s family was exhausted, trying to find and advocate for care. They were even looking for trans-friendly dentists.
“We don’t have the luxury of pretending everything’s fine”
Things were getting ugly. Rebecca’s father worked as a teacher in Texas, and one day a student in his class came up to him and said he had to show him something. The student played a video of a man brandishing a gun in a nearby town and saying he was going to kill the first trans person that tried to go into a bathroom with his daughter. It was a grim wake-up call. Rebecca’s father was starting to feel the strain of living in such an antagonistic environment. Speaking at school board meetings and being vocal about trans rights was the right thing to do, despite the personal cost. But they worried they were putting a target on their daughter’s back. Rebecca knew very little of these larger political developments. Some of it she heard for the first time while we were on a call together. “When we read enough research about detransition, a lot of trans folks who choose to detransition, they do it because of social or familial pressure,” her father says. “The last thing we ever wanted our daughter to feel is in order to make everybody else happy, she would need to shrink some part of herself back.”
The family contemplated splitting up so that Rebecca’s brother could stay with his friends and she could live in a more trans-friendly state like Washington or Oregon. But it would’ve been too expensive. Instead, the family moved as a unit to Washington to seek more favorable living conditions. Getting care became a lot smoother, and the family hasn’t experienced the vicious harassment they faced while living in Texas.
While these draconian laws were once confined to the state level, trans rights are now under federal threat. Rebecca’s family is worried about Trump’s executive orders in addition to HR 3492, or the Protect Children’s Innocence Act, a bill introduced by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene in 2025 that attempts to criminalize providing gender-affirming care to minors. “We don’t have the luxury of pretending everything’s fine,” Rebecca’s dad says.
Even in the Seattle area, which is famously queer-friendly, Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital has already stopped treating trans kids even as Seattle Children’s is attempting to “lawyer up,” as one parent phrased it. Many are terrified the Trump administration will come for adults next and are dismayed or surprised by the intense security that some gender clinics are now enforcing for fear of belligerent protesters and right-wing agitators. Many on the right don’t seem to distinguish between queer cis people and trans people, considering all of them a threat. One parent I spoke with described the grim shock he experienced after watching someone steal a pride flag from his front porch. He’s also had dog shit thrown at his door. Not that long after, he found another pride flag burning in the park. “There’s no logic to what’s going on,” he says.
In the wake of such stress, some kids have switched to being homeschooled. Plenty of families move states. Even if they stayed in the same town, there would be many “logistical things” to consider, one parent tells me. Switching from one hospital to another or to low-income or online clinics is a lot of red tape. Many of the families I spoke to talked about the fact that being trans was mundane — it was the bureaucracy that sucked up their time. Some kids were angry at the world before they were able to get hormones, experiencing mood shifts and intense mental health episodes, including suicide attempts in some cases. After getting treatment, however, things began to stabilize. The anxiety that bubbles up post-transition is a different kind, based more on what other people will think. Most of the students I spoke to experienced bullying and turbulent friendships that seemed to lead to self-esteem issues. Overall, once kids came out things “snapped into place.” One child found his relationships with both parents “skyrocketed.”
This was certainly Rebecca’s experience. Her family life leveled out, and she even started dating. Last fall she attended the homecoming dance. For now, her family is enjoying the simple things: helping Rebecca pick out a dress for winter formal, getting her ready for her first date, and sitting in “the world’s messiest bedroom” together. “Being trans is probably the most boring thing about Rebecca. If you were to ask me to describe her, that probably wouldn’t even be on the list,” her mom says over the phone. “That’s crazy, ’cause that’s always on my list,” Rebecca replies, giggling.
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