GOP lawmaker says she would rather have a dead child than a transgender one

Montana state Rep. Kerri Seekings-Crowe (R) said that she would rather have her daughter die by suicide than let her transition while debating a law that eventually passed to ban gender-affirming care for minors in the state.

“One of the big issues that we have heard today and we’ve talked about lately is that without surgery, the risk of suicide goes way up,” Seekings-Crowe said during a floor debate in the Montana House of Representatives last week. She did not say that her child was trans, just that she was “suicidal for three years.”

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Zooey Zephyr said she would “continue to make the difficult moral choices” to represent her constituents despite the ban.

“Well, I am one of those parents who lived with a daughter who was suicidal for three years,” she continued. “Someone once asked me, ‘Wouldn’t I just do anything to help save her?’ And I really had to think and the answer was, ‘No.'”

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She was debating S.B. 99, which bans all gender-affirming care for minors, including reversible puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy. Despite Seekings-Crowe’s statements, gender-affirming surgery is extremely rare for transgender minors and bottom surgery is not performed on minors.

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The state legislature passed the bill and Gov. Greg Gianforte (R) signed it on Friday, despite how his nonbinary son pled with him to veto it.

“See you in court,” ACLU of Montana attorney Akilah Dernose said in a statement about the passage of the bill.

“There’s so much support in our communities for trans people and trans youth. And I feel very confident that the people who are in this fight are in it for the long haul and will not stop until Montana is the type of place where all of us can live the lives that we want to,” said Forward Montana organizer Izzy Milch. “The most important thing there is that trans people have been in Montana forever and will be in Montana forever.”

Opponents of the bill said that gender-affirming care is part of the standard of care recommended by major health organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. Puberty blockers, in particular, have been shown to lower lifelong suicide risk for transgender people who get them as teenagers.

But Seekings-Crowe compared bringing up how these medical treatments save lives to her daughter’s supposed “emotional manipulation.”

“I was not going to give in to her emotional manipulation because she was incapable of making those decisions and I had to make those decisions for her,” she said.

“I was not going to let her tear apart my family and I was not going to let her tear apart me because I had to be strong for her. I had to have a vision for her life when she had none, was incapable of having none.”

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“I was lost. I was scared. I spent hours on the floor in prayer because I didn’t know that when I woke up, if my daughter was going to be alive or not. But I knew that I had to make those right decisions for her so that she would have a precious, successful adulthood at that time.”

Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) said he disagreed with her on Twitter.

“I vehemently disagree with this speech by GOP state rep Kerri Seekins-Crowe,” he wrote. “But you know what she didn’t say? That it should be the government’s role to make personal decisions for families. Why is she now shoving her private decision down other people’s throats?”

I vehemently disagree with this speech by GOP state rep Kerri Seekins-Crowe. But you know what she didn’t say? That it should be the government’s role to make personal decisions for families. Why is she now shoving her private decision down other people’s throats? https://t.co/Fuyu2q42CJ

— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) April 28, 2023

S.B. 99 will go into effect in October if a judge doesn’t block it. Several other states’ bans on gender-affirming care have been blocked by federal judges.

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