Nicholas Lavender, left, and his mother Beth Rosch at their home on Tuesday, Feb. 6, 2024. (Minh Ha/Verite News)
NEW ORLEANS — Nicholas Lavender, 15, said everything changed for the better after he started receiving healthcare to affirm his identity as a transgender man through CrescentCare in 2022.
“I’ve gotten so much more confident, I’m so much more happy with myself, I have a lot more friends, I’m more outgoing,” he told Verite News. “It’s so good to have access to it.”
But all of that was threatened last year, when the Louisiana Legislature passed a bill banning transgender youth from accessing gender-affirming healthcare in the state, going so far as to override a veto by then-Gov. John Bel Edwards in order to codify the ban into state law.
The law, Act 466, prohibits doctors from performing surgery on minors — though those procedures are rare, according to a recent study — or prescribing hormones to them, which is more common.
The ban went into effect at the beginning of this year. It contained a carve out for youth who are already receiving hormone replacement therapy, though not indefinitely. The law only allows doctors to gradually wean them off medication, a form of detransitioning, with a cutoff at the end of the year.