The Medical University of South Carolina initially said it wouldn’t be affected by a law banning use of state funds for treatment “furthering the gender transition” of children under 16. Months later, it cut off that care to all trans minors.
One Saturday morning in September 2022, Terrence Steyer, the dean of the College of Medicine at the Medical University of South Carolina, placed an urgent call to a student. Just a year prior, the medical student, Thomas Agostini, had won first place at a university-sponsored event for his graduate research on transgender pediatric patients. He also had been featured in a video on MUSC’s website highlighting resources that support the LGBTQ+ community.
Now, Agostini and his once-lauded study had set off a political firestorm. Conservative activists seized on one line in particular in the study’s summary — a parenthetical noting the youngest transgender patient to visit MUSC’s pediatric endocrinology clinic was 4 years old — and inaccurately claimed that children that young were prescribed hormones as part of a gender transition. Elon Musk amplified the false claim, tweeting, “Is it really true that four-year-olds are receiving hormone treatment?” That led federal and state lawmakers to frantically ask top MUSC leaders whether the public hospital was in fact helping young children medically transition. The hospital was not; its pediatric transgender patients did not receive hormone therapy before puberty, nor does it offer surgical options to minors.
Gender is a concept that exists. That kids will interact with throughout their lives. They deserve to be equipped with the information that helps them makes sense of that.
It doesn’t include gender roles in any version that I have seen.
The closest I’ve seen it get to gender roles is “gender expression”, which it touches on to explicitly separate the concept of gendered expression, from gender identity and biological sex.
In other words, it does the exact opposite of the thing you fear that it does. Its entire purpose is to state that the things you described about yourself earlier, such as being a tomboy, are separate from gender identity and biological sex. That being a tomboy, or having interests that are stereotypically gendered, DO NOT make you that gender.
Those can be interesting conversations even if the answer at the end is “they’re still cisgender”. Cisgender people have been writing gender into stories for a long time, and a lot of those stories do end up have themes very relatable for trans people. Relooking at media through a queer lens is not harmful.