As expected the Oak Park Village Board voted unanimously to approve adding a provision protecting the right to receive gender affirming care to its Human Rights Ordinance at its Sept. 30 meeting. Still, the vote generated strong opinions from community members who spoke up at the meeting.
“As a lesbian and a mother I appreciate the board’s commitment to residents who don’t align with expected gender norms,” said Layla Shaaban in a public comment to the board. “However the board’s proposal uses a human rights ordinance to endorse unnamed medical practices, which seems awkward and not fully considered. It also inserts Oak Park’s officials and all of its residents on to a particular side of an important global debate on the effectiveness and ethics around gender affirming care.”
Shaaban said adding gender affirming care to the village’s human rights ordinance risks silencing debate on a controversial topic.
“I ask the board not to approve this amendment because it has the potential to silence the right of free speech and assembly of residents who might be concerned about these issues,” Shaaban said.
Shaaban argued gender transition could be termed another type of gay conversion therapy and cited “detransitioners who have received gender affirming care and then given up their trans identification” who are “sharing deep concerns about these medical practices.”
However the three other public commenters on the issue, none of whom had planned to speak at the meeting, all favored adding protections for gender affirming care to the village’s Human Rights Ordinance.
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“When we talk about trans rights that’s a fiction, these are human rights that are under attack,” said Aaron McManus calling the addition to the Human Rights Ordinance a very important first step. “Trans people just happen to represent freedom and self-expression, freedom to self-determine who you are. Freedom to know yourself and not be defined by other people. Gender affirming care is something that also belongs to everybody. If you get to go to a sports bar that makes you feel more like a man, right on, that’s gender affirming care. Creating safe spaces for trans people saves lives. There’s studies for that. Gender affirming care saves lives.”
Another speaker rattled off a list of 29 medical or health related organizations, including the American Medical Association, who support gender affirming care.
With the addition of gender affirming to its Human Rights Ordinance, Oak Park will now prohibit village agencies or agents from providing information about or otherwise investigating or aid in the investigation of any person or entity for providing or receiving gender affirming care. The ordinance also states the village will object to any subpoena or requests for information from any out of state person or entity which is investigating someone in connection with a law criminalizing gender affirming care.
Before the vote, Village Board members Brian Straw and Jenna Leving Jacobson and village President Vicki Scaman all spoke in favor of adding protections for gender affirming care to the Human Rights Ordinance.
Straw said Oak Park has become something of a sanctuary for trans and queer people.
“I have heard from so many parents of kids who are gender queer or trans who have moved to Oak Park because the communities they were living in, the states they were living in, were not safe for them,” Straw said. “Oak Park has been a sanctuary, if not by ordinance, for some time and people have heard in far reaches of the country that this is a safe place for them to come and raise their kids. So I think that us taking this first step is important, and I’m very encouraged by the fact that this is a first step that will lead to additional conversations about what protections we can put into place. So I am enthusiastically supportive of this ordinance and of a continuing process where we are, you know, where we are taking a deeper look at what it means to be a sanctuary and what further protections we can meaningfully put in place.”
Leving Jacobson said while she believes in free speech, certain things are not debatable.
“We can maintain free speech, open dialogue, but human rights are never going to be up for debate and we’re not going to debate whether any individual, because of their identity, should have the same rights to care, to safety, to community,” Leving Jacobson said.
Scaman said adding protections for gender affirming care to the village’s Human Rights Ordinance was something that she believed in very strongly.
“I’m all in on this,” Scaman said.
Bob Skolnik is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.