What South Dakota Doesn’t Get About Transgender Children

Early in my medical training, I read a landmark case study about a 12-year-old boy who wrote a suicide note to his mother saying he would rather die than go through puberty. I later met teenagers who tightly bound their chests — knowing that it could result in fractured ribs — because the emotional pain of seeing their breasts was much worse than any imaginable physical pain.

These children are transgender, and they account for almost 2 percent of youth in the United States. They are suffering from the psychological...