Our transgender daughter’s life was saved by care that Idaho legislators want to ban | Opinion
Seventeen years ago, my wife and I joyfully stood in front of our congregation, before our families and before God, and vowed to love, nurture and protect our newborn baby.
In the ensuing years, we have done just that. We have devoted ourselves and our energies to being the best, most supportive and loving parents we can be; and we believe with God’s help, we have been largely successful.
Our faith informs us that Jesus is the Great Physician and that health care providers are His hands and feet providing a ministry of healing guided by His very hands.
When our teen daughter became suicidal, we faced every parent’s worst nightmare. No parent wants to see their child hurt, or suffering. In our child’s case, she was suffering from severe gender dysphoria.
As health care professionals (I am a physical therapist, my wife is a family physician), we made sure that our daughter had all of the counseling and professional help she needed. After a couple of years of therapy, our daughter’s providers recommended medical treatment for her situation. Because of our respect for standard practices of medical care and our faith, we facilitated this treatment and watched our daughter blossom into the amazing, happy, well-adjusted and successful teenager she is today.
Without the medical care she received, our daughter would not be alive today.
Rep. Bruce Skaug, R-Nampa, believes that he and the state of Idaho know better than my wife and I do when it comes to raising our daughter. Rep. Skaug believes that our parental autonomy and our religious faith are secondary to his poor understanding of and lack of compassion for our family and families like ours.
Oddly, Rep. Skaug also believes that the members of the Followers of Christ Church in Canyon County (who deny their children basic medical care, resulting in over 150 deaths from preventable and treatable illnesses, likely eight or more, within the past two years), are worthy of protection by the state of Idaho, but my wife and I deserve to spend 10 years in prison for providing lifesaving, standard medical care to our daughter
Let me be very clear: The care we have provided our daughter is standard practice endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association.
Let me also be clear: Rep. Skaug has ZERO medical training and has repeatedly acted as if he knows better than medical professionals with decades of training and clinical practice. Additionally, he also feels that our religious faith and parental rights are to be subjugated to his prejudice and personal biases.
Rep. Skaug believes in inserting the power of government into the most personal relationships and deepest freedoms we all hold dear.
In my 30 years of living in Idaho, I never would have guessed that Idaho lawmakers would try to tell me and my wife how to raise our children, or that we or her providers would be imprisoned for performing standard medical care – in our case, lifesaving care – to our child. This is not the “freedom” and “parental rights” that Idaho’s dominant political party claims to champion. This is textbook big-government overreach and a violation of basic parental autonomy and religious freedom.
This is not Idaho. Lest you think your parental rights and religious freedom are safe from Rep. Skaug and government overreach, know this: We used to believe that, too.
Michael J. Devitt lives, works and raises his family in Boise.