Lily is ten years old.
She likes what most ten year olds like. She is not the subject of a policy debate in her own head. But her family packed up and left their home state this year, not because of anything she did, not because of a job or a school or a better house somewhere else. They left because their own government decided her existence was something to legislate, and staying meant losing the care that was keeping her okay. She said she was devastated. Ten years old, and devastated is the word she reached for, because her state decided the fight over her body was worth having. She didn’t start that fight. She’s just the one living inside it.
Everything else in this piece is the explanation for why that happened to her.
For years now the line has been wait for the science. Wait and see. Even Europe is pulling back, they say, so how radical can we really be for doing the same thing here. That line just lost its foundation, and it lost it in the one place it couldn’t afford to.
The Netherlands invented the treatment model this entire fight is about. The Dutch Protocol is the reason gender affirming care for trans youth looks the way it does anywhere in the world. So, when the Health Council of the Netherlands, the government’s own independent scientific advisory body, the one that’s been guiding Dutch public health policy since 1902, spent two full years re-examining its own model, that wasn’t outside noise. That was the source checking itself.
They didn’t do it quietly, and they didn’t do it because they wanted to. They did it because of the UK’s Cass Review, the report that’s been waved around for two years as proof the science had turned. So the Dutch built Hilary Cass directly into their own review. Not as a footnote. As a consulted dissenting voice, brought into the room on purpose, given a real seat at the table. I’ll say the honest part too, because leaving it out would be a lie by omission: the UK tightened its guidelines. So did Sweden. So did Finland. That’s real, and pretending otherwise would make me no better than the people I’m writing about.
But here’s what actually happened after all of that got put in front of the Dutch. They looked at the same concerns that made those other countries pull back. They had the person who wrote the most famous version of those concerns sitting in the room while they did it. And they still said keep going.
The findings weren’t close. Mental health outcomes improved after treatment compared to before it. Less depression. Less suicidality. Less self harm. Regret turned out to be rare. And the sentence sitting at the center of the whole report is the one that should be getting quoted everywhere right now and isn’t: non-treatment is not a neutral option. Waiting isn’t the safe choice. Waiting is a choice with a cost, and the people who built the original treatment just spent two years proving it, under pressure, on purpose, in public.
Now look at what happened here during those same two years.
The Supreme Court let Tennessee’s ban on this exact care stand, in United States v. Skrmetti, June of last year. An executive order called the same care chemical and surgical mutilation. Hospitals that had been providing this treatment for years, including Children’s National in DC and Children’s Hospital LA, shut their programs down under federal legal pressure, not because a single piece of evidence changed. Sixteen state attorneys general had to sue their own federal government, calling the pattern of subpoenas and investigations exactly what it is, a national ban built through intimidation instead of law. Over six hundred bills targeting trans people got introduced in a single year. And through all of it, the country’s own medical establishment, the AMA, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society, kept saying the same thing they’d been saying, that the care is medically sound, and called the administration’s framing of it as negligent something rooted in politics and partisanship… not medicine.
One country asked. The other one didn’t. That’s the whole comparison, underneath every paragraph of it.
Now here’s who they aimed it at.
Not a movement. Not a lobby. Somewhere around 2.8 million people in this country are transgender. Roughly 1% of the population age 13 and up. Small enough to miss. Small enough to be safe to attack.
Except that number is almost certainly low. It comes from federal health surveys, the same kind of government data collection currently being subpoenaed and used as a weapon in multiple states. Researchers who study exactly this problem have found, in peer reviewed work, that hostile political climates suppress how honestly people disclose a stigmatized identity to any government survey. Nobody fully tells the truth to a form when the truth on that form could be used against them. Call 1% a floor, not a ceiling.
And no legitimate scientific or medical body on this planet disputes that these people exist. None. The actual debate in serious medicine is about treatment protocols for minors. It was never about whether trans people are real or ‘mentally ill’. That distinction gets erased on purpose, because erasing it is the whole argument.
This doesn’t stay in the legislature either. It doesn’t stop at a bill signing.
Since 2013, when tracking began, nearly 400 transgender people have been killed in this country. Twenty seven in the last year alone. Roughly 70% of the victims were Black. Close to 60% were specifically Black trans women. Seventy one percent of the cases involved a gun.
Read that again next to the six hundred bills.
They’re not two separate stories.
They’re the same goddamn story, told in two different rooms.
So why. Follow the money and it gets stranger than you’d expect, and honestly worse.
In 2024 alone, over two hundred million dollars got spent on anti-trans political ads. Then came Virginia, 2025. One candidate spent 57% of her entire ad budget attacking trans people specifically. She lost by nearly 15 points. Her own party turned on the strategy in public. A former Republican lieutenant governor called it exactly what it was: a losing distraction from the issues voters actually cared about.
And they’re running it back for 2026 anyway.
A strategy adjusts when it stops working. This didn’t adjust. That’s not politics anymore. That’s a compulsion, and they’re financing it even when it costs them the election.
So go back to Lily.
She didn’t do anything. She’s ten. Somewhere in a government building, someone decided her existence was a policy question worth legislating. Somewhere else, an entire country actually ran the science on the question these people claim to care about, under adversarial conditions, with the harshest available critic in the room, and got an answer they didn’t like. They got the review they said they wanted. It came from the country that invented the exact thing they’re afraid of. The answer was still yes.
They just don’t want that answer. So it isn’t about winning anymore.
It’s about who’s left to aim at.
Right now, that’s a ten year old girl who used the word devastated, and had to leave home.
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