In recent years, states across the Mountain West have passed laws that limit doctors from providing transgender children with certain kinds of gender-affirming care, from prohibitions on surgery to bans on puberty blockers and hormones. Colorado families say their state was a haven for those health services for a long time, but following executive orders from the Trump administration, even hospitals in Colorado limited the care they offer for trans patients under age 19. KFF Health News Colorado correspondent Rae Ellen Bichell spoke with youth and their families.
GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. — On a Friday after school, 6-year-old Esa Rodrigues had unraveled a ball of yarn, spooked the pet cat, polled family members about their favorite colors, and tattled on a sibling for calling her a “butt-face mole rat.”
Next, she was laser-focused on prying open cherry-crisp-flavored lip gloss with her teeth.
“Yes!” she cried, twisting open the cap. Esa applied the gloopy, shimmery stuff in her bedroom, where a large transgender pride flag hung on the wall.
Esa said the flag makes her feel “important” and “happy.” She’d like to take it down from the wall and wear it as a cape.
Her parents questioned her identity at first, but not anymore. Before, their anxious child dreaded going to school, bawled at the barbershop when she got a boy’s haircut, and curled into a fetal position on the bathroom floor when she learned she would never get a period.
Now, that child is happily bounding up a hill, humming to herself, wondering aloud if fairies …