The first time Jennilyn Nichols' transgender daughter lost healthcare, they were on vacation in Florida. Flower, her now 14-year-old daughter, was outside swimming, and another parent called Nichols to tell her that Indiana's law banning pediatric gender-affirming care had passed. It wouldn't go into effect immediately in April 2023, though, so there was time to find continuing care.
The ACLU of Indiana filed a lawsuit seeking to block the law, delaying its enforcement. Nichols met a doctor in Chicago to prepare for the change. Then, in February 2024, a federal judge ruled against a preliminary injunction. Senate Enrolled Act 480 went into effect immediately.
“My absolute worst day was running up to her drawer and counting how many doses of medication we had so I knew how long I had to find a place,” Nichols said, “and that, as a parent, is so horrifying. I was so helpless in that moment — that my child needed medication, and I may not be able to get her that.”
Flower is one of an estimated 16,000 transgender kids ages 13 to 17 in Indiana — about 3.3% of the state’s youth population, according to the Williams Institute at UCLA. Since 2022, Indiana has passed a wave of policies restricting the lives of transgender people, including bands on gender-affirming care for minors, restrictions on transgender girls playing on girls’ sports teams, requirements that schools report students’ pronouns and preferred names to parents, and limits on changing gender markers on documents like driver’s licenses and birth certificates.
Families across the state told WFYI the policies brought fear, depression and hopelessness — and send the message that their children should not exist here.
After the gender-affirming care ban went into effect, Flower became a patient at the University of Chicago. Her family would get snacks for the drive, including rainbow-colored sour candy to munch on, and try to balance out the seriousness of the doctor appointments with fun. Flower’s favorite way to do it is to drive up the day before. They'd make the best of it with games or seeing a Broadway show.
The medical appointments included blood work, scans and hormone blocker shots.
“I will be very adamant that this medication is important and that it is life-saving, and I would change nothing,” Flower said about the painful shots. “And at the same time, it is not fun to go through.”
Traveling out-of-state for medical care is expensive: gas, hotels, wear and tear on the car. And Nichols said while their insurance covers Flower’s hormone blocker shots, other families may need to pay the market price of almost $27,000.
But the healthcare in Chicago didn’t last. On July 18, 2025 — about a year and a half after Indiana’s ban became effective — Nichols received a message from UChicago Medicine: It immediately discontinued all gender-affirming pediatric care. It was a response to actions from President Donald Trump’s administration.
“Anticipated actions by the federal government would prohibit us from caring for all Medicare or Medicaid patients, which make up the majority of the patients we serve,” the message read in part.
Now, Flower attends a private clinic out-of-state.
Nichols said politicians chose to make this harder for them.
“So, yeah. It’s exhausting, and we still believe absolutely it’s necessary healthcare, and we’re absolutely going to get it done. But I don’t think we deserved this.”
'What is the gain?'
Not every family's experience with these policies looks the same.
Jessie Fisk’s 14-year-old daughter, Christah, is transgender and attends public school. Like the Nichols, they also travel out-of-state for her healthcare. Christah likes practicing music and wants to pursue a career in aerospace engineering. For her, the state's sports bans made her feel "dehumanized."
“Being treated as something that I’m not is just huge. It’s not politics at that point, it’s discrimination,” Christah said. “All of [the policies], really, altogether, just made me realize that the people with these bills and passing these bills just saw themselves as more and saw trans people as less than human.”
Fisk worries for her daughter’s safety and anxiously looks to each state legislative session to see what new policies lawmakers will consider. She particularly worries about a bathroom ban.
“It’s very frustrating that we focus on these types of bills that make it harder for trans people, specifically trans kids, because what is the gain?” Fisk said.
This year, lawmakers again considered another bill focused on the trans community, introduced by Sen. Liz Brown (R-Fort Wayne). The wide-ranging Senate Bill 182 would have banned changes to gender markers on birth certificates, assigned incarcerated transgender people to state prison facilities based on sex at birth, and restricted restroom use in public schools and universities to align with sex at birth.
Nichols had started showing up to the statehouse in recent years to support her daughter, first just holding signs. This year, she testified to the committee in January, pleading with lawmakers to leave her family and others like them alone.
“You have this duality of your child’s hurting, and you have to help that, but you’re also going through your own mourning and sort of social awakening, and the aspect that this doesn’t serve all the people,” Nichols told WFYI. “Now that we’re on this other side of this imaginary line, that, you know, we’re not the kind of people that are wanted in this state.”
But something different happened this year. Even though the bill passed the committee along party lines, it languished in the House of Representatives and ultimately did not become law.
LGBTQ advocates said the 2026 legislative session was the first time that no major anti-LGBTQ legislation passed the Indiana statehouse in years.
Gov. Mike Braun and Brown have said these policies are rooted in biology, not ideology. Braun has signed executive orders targeting what he called "extreme gender ideology," including measures affecting gender-marker changes on state documents and transgender women in college sports.
Brown, who authored this year's bill, told the committee in January that the legislation would enshrine "a scientific-based definition" of male and female in state code, citing safety in prisons and shared facilities. After the legislative session ended and the bill died, Brown told WFYI that the House “failed Hoosiers” on protecting women’s private spaces.
Becoming an advocate
Ryan Welch and his wife have lived in Indianapolis for over 20 years. Their son, who is 19, came out as trans during the pandemic.
Before he came out, Welch said his son had withdrawn — he was depressed, wore clothes to conceal his body in the summer heat, and isolated from social interactions. But when he started gender-affirming care around 2022, something clicked.
“As soon as he started [testosterone], it was, I mean, almost day one, just when he was told, ‘Yes, you’re going to start it,’ there was a smile I hadn’t seen in a long, long time,” Welch said.
It didn’t happen immediately — they met with doctors, a therapist and a psychologist first.
Welch’s son is an artist. As he began transitioning, his self image improved, and his art reflected the change. Then, about six months later, Indiana introduced its ban on gender-affirming care at the statehouse.
“It was crushing to think that we had six months of having our son back, having our child back,” Welch said. “We were just like, ‘No. Hell no, this isn’t going to happen.’”
The Welches wrote to the ACLU of Indiana to share their story, which asked if they wanted to be plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the state’s ban. They accepted. It began a journey for Welch and his wife, who have since participated in protests, written legislators, and become advocates for trans youth.
Because of the judge’s ruling in Feb. 2024, they had to seek healthcare out-of-state too.
Welch said he feels that parents who support their trans children have had the narrative taken from them by people who do not understand trans youth.
“There’s been a narrative that’s kind of been stolen from the far right, and in all of this misinformation,” Welch said. “It would be anything I can do to let people know the story of our story, or the story of this community, without putting pressure on the community.”
The ACLU recently filed to dismiss the lawsuit the Welches joined after the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2025, which upheld state bans on pediatric gender-affirming care, including in Indiana.
'We're just over here existing'
Flower, like Christah and Welch's son, is like other kids. She likes playing with her brother and friends, swimming, and exploring the forest. She especially likes writing. But when she was four years old, she knew she was different.
“I didn’t know, really, that trans people existed, and I didn’t really know many things. I just knew that I wanted to be a girl,” she said.
Nichols, her mom, said Flower wanted her hair styled like other girls and didn’t want to wear boys’ clothes. She would cry in the mornings and the parents were increasingly worried. They met with psychologists.
One day, Nichols picked up Flower from school.
“She said, ‘The teachers at school told me I was a boy again, Mom, and they said that God made me a boy.’ And I said, ‘Oh, how do you feel about that?’ And she goes, ‘How do I get God to change his mind?’ And my heart just shattered,” Nichols said.
Nichols realized not dealing with Flower’s dysphoria was harming her child.
Flower started wearing dresses outside the house. Later, they found a support group. The first time they went, a woman greeted them and asked what she should put on their nametags.
“Before she even finished it, she was like, ‘Flower! My name is Flower!’” Nichols said, “like this was just always in her, like she had this in some back pocket of her psyche … and she was Flower from that day on.”
The Nichols continue to live in Indiana, despite all of the challenges they’ve faced, but haven’t ruled out leaving.
“We constantly consider moving,” Nichols said. “We are Hoosiers. My family is here, my husband’s family is here, we grew up here, and we were taught Hoosier hospitality. It’s very difficult to think about just packing all of that up and leaving.”
Fisk, too, has considered leaving, but the cost of moving — including uprooting her daughter from school, friendships and marching band — has made it tough to wrestle with.
“I do check in with her frequently,” she said. “You know, ‘Please let me know if it gets to the point where you say I want to start looking to leave the state, and then will start looking’ … but it hasn’t reached that yet.”
Welch said his family doesn’t have plans to move. His son may consider an out-of-state art school in the future.
“The political climate here is very hostile to transgender people, and we need, I think, every voice that we can to push back on that,” he said.
Nichols and Flower said they’re tired of defending their existence across the legislative seasons.
“We feel hunted,” Nichols said. “We’re not even doing anything wrong. We’re not trying to pitch that every kid should be trans. We’re just over here existing.”
The family doesn't know what they’ll do next. They’re in what Nichols calls “watching and waiting” mode. But in the meantime, Flower and her mom said they’ll keep fighting — and living their lives.
Contact WFYI reporter Zak Cassel at zcassel@wfyi.org
