Alexander Eli says he always knew he was a man.
“The reality is that I am trans. There’s no choice in it. The choice is deciding if you want to live your truth or if you want to alienate yourself and drive yourself absolutely mad trying to live in these binaries,” he said.
Eli began taking testosterone in 2020.
“Without the Gainesville equal access clinic, which is where I have to go — I have to go to another city to have access to the medical care that I need — I don’t know if I would be here because it is really hard,” he explained.
Eli says medical care for gender-assigning procedures like surgery and treatments such as puberty blockers and hormone therapies are expensive.
Gov. Ron DeSantis is pushing to ban those procedures for those under the age of 18 and wants to keep Medicaid from covering them.
The Agency for Health Care Administration, which administers the Florida Medicaid program, claimed such treatments and procedures could have harmful long-term effects.
And a letter from the state surgeon general recommends against it, expressing “the scientific evidence supporting these complex medical interventions is extraordinarily weak.”
But the stances of the Agency for Health Care Administration and the Department of Health conflict with studies from national medical groups and the Biden administration.
To Eli, not having access to such care is dangerous.
“The concept around that you can prevent someone from being trans based on their access to gender-affirming care on a medical level isn’t what makes you trans, medical transitioning is a part of it for some people but not for everybody,” he said.
DeSantis didn’t talk about the issue at a news conference in Orlando on Friday, where he was with the state’s surgeon general. Eli expects he’ll hear from plenty of Floridians in the coming days.
“We need to let people know that they deserve to be here, there’s space for them here, no matter where you fall on the spectrum,” he said.
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