Update on February 10: The South Dakota bill discussed in this article failed in a state senate committee vote. Read the latest here.

Right now in South Dakota, trans teens are afraid of what lawmakers might decide on their behalf. They could potentially be impacted by a bill passed in South Dakota’s House of Representatives late last month that would criminalize providing medical transition services to young people like them.

That bill, HB 1057, would make it a felony to give people under 16 puberty blockers, a reversible medical intervention that can temporarily suppress puberty. The point of these blockers is to save young trans people from experiencing changes to their body at odds with who they know themselves to be, giving them time to consider other forms of treatment.

“This bill makes me feel scared since this is something that affects me deeply,” 15-year-old Aerin Geary (they/them) told NBC News. “Transitioning is something that I've been hoping to get and been yearning for for years.” Aerin said they only recently convinced their family to let them begin transitioning, adding that anything impeding that “could be a huge blow to my hope.”

“Transitioning saves our lives. Hope saves our lives,” Aerin told NBC News. “My hope now is that [the bill] dies before it kills.”

Unfortunately, Aerin and his fellow South Dakotans aren’t the only trans youth at risk. As laid out by Vox and Vice, efforts to criminalize providing medical services to trans youth are currently under consideration in eight states: South Dakota, Colorado, Oklahoma, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Florida.

And that isn’t the only type of anti-trans legislation on state dockets right now. There are bills in Alabama, Tennessee, and New Hampshire that seek to regulate trans participation in school sports. There is another Kentucky bill that would let students sue schools that let trans kids use the right bathrooms (the ones that match who they are). And there are two Arizona bills that would require school staff to use the wrong pronouns and stipulate sex education must “emphasize biological sex and not gender identities.” As NBC News noted, these bills targeting trans youth are part of a larger wave of bills targeting LGBTQ+ people and their rights.

In all this legislation, I see the same kinds of social control that have been imposed on trans people for ages. We are blocked from exercising bodily autonomy in seeking medical treatment. Mainstream social environments (like high school sports) enforce a do-or-die mentality about staying in the closet, ostracizing those of us who come out. We are portrayed as the aggressors who create conditions where cis people need legal recourse to fight against us. And our identities (as they manifest in something as simple as pronouns) and very realities (as they might be expressed in a modern sex-ed curriculum) are erased, ignored, and intentionally discredited.

Libby Skarin is the policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of South Dakota. If you’ve followed the fight over trans rights in state legislatures in recent years, you might already be familiar with her work in South Dakota’s 2016 fight over a so-called “bathroom bill.” Skarin tells Teen Vogue that what’s happening now has a “surreal” resemblance to that year’s wave of bills about trans bathroom access.

At the center of that similarity is the man who sponsored both South Dakota’s HB 1008 in 2016 (which sought to block trans students from using the right bathrooms in public schools) and this year’s HB 1057: Republican representative Fred Deutsch. Deutsch introduced HB 1057 on January 14, the very first day of the state’s 2020 legislative session.