A mom says South Dakota's new anti-trans law is forcing her to drive 4 hours across state lines to take her child to the doctor: 'It's absolutely exhausting.'

• South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem signed a bill that bans gender-affirming health care for trans youth.
• Elizabeth Broekemeier, mother to a 13-year-old trans kid, said the law flipped her life upside-down.
• To get gender-affirming care for her son, she now has to drive more than 230 miles out of state.

A South Dakota mom says a law that bans trans healthcare for youth in South Dakota has forced her to find new ways to help her 13-year-old trans son obtain gender-affirming care — including by finding and commuting to new doctors across state lines. 

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem last week signed the "Help Not Harm" bill into law, making it illegal for medical professionals to provide certain forms of gender-affirming healthcare for trans youth in the state.

Gender-affirming care is healthcare given to trans and nonbinary people that can include medical, surgical, mental health, and non-medical services, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services. South Dakota's law says healthcare professionals cannot prescribe puberty blockers, which are reversible, administer hormone therapy, or perform gender-affirming surgery.

Because of the new law, Elizabeth Broekemeier said she now drives over 230 miles from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to Minneapolis with her child to a doctor who provides gender-affirming care. 

Broekemeier said she found providers in Minnesota who agreed to pick up her son's medical care. The process to switch, however, was lengthy and frustrating, she told Insider in an interview. 

It first required checking to see if those doctors were taking new patients and then transferring all of his medical records to the new institutions. The process continues to be inconvenient, she said. 

"It's that reintroduction of a brand new care team," she said. "We have history with his doctors right now, and the fact that we're going to have to start a brand new relationship, rebuild that trust, rebuild a new doctor-patient relationship all over again."

She also has to coordinate with her ex-husband to figure out how to transport their son to the doctor's office in Minnesota. 

That means sometimes either of them misses work — or their son misses school. It takes up to four hours to drive from Sioux Falls to Minneapolis, Broekemeier said.

"Instead of it just being an afternoon appointment at the doctor's office, it turns into a full day," Broekemeier said.

Tears, anger, and frustration

When the bill was first introduced in the South Dakota House of Representatives in mid-January, Broekemeier and her ex-husband told their son the news. 

There were "lots of tears, lots of obviously anger from my son," Broekemeier said. 

Already at school, he had been struggling with peers and teachers accepting that he's trans and had built up resentment, she said. 

For weeks, he's listened to testimony before the South Dakota legislature and has monitored the bill's progress, leading up to Noem signing it into law. 

Broekemeier herself testified before South Dakota lawmakers, she said, in an effort to get them to vote down the bill.

The testimony was especially hard for her son to listen to, she said, "because he was basically likened to a medical experiment by the proponents of this bill. And that's absolutely dehumanizing."

Her son has told her multiple times in the bill's lifespan that he wants to move out of South Dakota. 

"He counts down until he turns 18 to when he can leave the state," she said. 

Broekemeier and her ex-husband, though, can't leave the state due to their jobs. Her job provides the insurance that allows her son to receive gender-affirming care. If she switches jobs or moves out of state, there's no guarantee her insurance will cover those costs, she said.

The family also has deep ties to South Dakota, and their 7-year-old child is comfortable and settled in the state. Aside from the fact that they are settled there, Broekemeier worries that uprooting their life would lead to cost-of-living increases they might not be able to handle.

It's also about the family's sense of belonging, Broekemeier said.

"I belong here too, and my son belongs here too," she said. "And you don't have the right to push us out when we've been here as functioning members of society for almost 30 years."

When asked whether Noem is concerned about parents like Broekemeier, her spokesperson Ian Fury directed Insider to a press release that does not mention parents. 

In the release, dated February 13, Noem said she wants to protect kids from "harmful, permanent medical procedures."

Utah last month passed a similar ban on gender-affirming care for youth, a law that made some families reconsider their residency. A 17-year-old trans kid, for example, told Insider that the law forced him to start planning a move to Portland.

At least 21 other states are considering similar bills this year. Recently, Iowa Republicans proposed their own version of Florida's "Don't Say Gay" bill, in which school officials and faculty members are required to get permission from parents before calling students a nickname that does not "correspond to the biological sex" listed on their birth certificate. 

Such laws can increase the likelihood that trans youth experience mental illnesses, two experts told Insider. 

"Access to gender-affirming hormones reduces suicidality and suicide attempts by about 50%," said Minneapolis-based pediatrician Angela Kade Goepferd. "So I would accept that losing access to that care is going to increase suicidality in those populations. And I think that that's probably the thing that parents are most worried about."

There might also be a significant increase in trans youth experiencing depression, said Mayson Bedient, a doctor who provides gender-affirming care in North Dakota. 

The American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended that trans and gender-diverse youth have access to gender-affirming care and warned that trans youth who are denied access to such care are more likely to have poor mental health outcomes.

Broekemeier said her son's mental health is on her mind now more than ever.

"As a human, to have these bills come forth and these blatant attacks on your identity and who you are as a person, I mean, it's absolutely exhausting," she said.

Broekemeier feels helpless. "I feel like I can't do anything to protect him," she said.

She said she's been having trouble sleeping in the last few weeks. She worries people aren't more upset by the onslaught of anti-trans legislation piling up across the country.