New Mexico’s children are hurting. Their state is beautiful — freckled with red rocks, cacti, and the occasional Allsup’s. As a seventh-generation Texan, I admire our shared endless deserts and rich histories.

Still, the Land of Enchantment is unknown to most Texans, let alone the rest of the country. Routinely ranking last in education, yet spending more than top-ranking neighbor Colorado, New Mexico is a genuine mystery — an American black hole.

When the New Mexico legislature passed HB 7 in 2023, proponents of gender medicine celebrated. Under HB 7, public regulation of “gender-affirming care” became, for all intents and purposes, illegal. Any attempts at regulation — or basic gatekeeping — must be measured against a “medical standard of care” that itself is in dispute.

It’s no coincidence that this bill lumps “gender-affirming care” together with the hot-button issue of abortion: Planned Parenthood, one of the state’s top providers, champions both.

In the first half of 2026, visits to New Mexico Planned Parenthood clinics jumped by 50%, half of them from out of state. Texans have moved there to circumvent our own protections for minors under SB 14. Some have said so publicly, and Planned Parenthood’s leaders share they’re proud to enable it.

New Mexico is surrounded by states with protections like Texas’s. A second law, SB 13, sealed its black hole status: it grants legal immunity to those involved in “transitioning” children and shields the practice from out-of-state investigations into the harm it causes.

In July, I drove from Roswell back home to Austin. It took eight hours; the hotel was thirty bucks. The pipeline is that easy to reach: cheap, legal, and largely off-grid. A black hole emits no light of its own, and what falls in rarely comes back out. The families arrive, the appointments are kept, the numbers climb — and the country goes on not looking.

This month, our nation’s children return to school, and it’s worth asking what New Mexico has prepared for them. The answer isn’t a secret, though you wouldn’t know it from the state’s marketing. New Mexico ranks 47th in the nation for child well-being, and 50th in education.

Its own families had to sue to force the point. In Yazzie/Martinez v. State of New Mexico, a court found in 2018 that the state was failing its most vulnerable students: Native American, poor, disabled, and those still learning English. Seven years later, New Mexico remains under that order and out of compliance, its latest fix rejected by the very families it was meant to serve.

Set that pattern of failure and disregard for child well-being against the speed and pride with which the state hands out gender medicine. All kids are vulnerable, yet the population riddled with dysphoria — creative, autistic, weird — mirrors the very populations going unserved in New Mexico schools.

New Mexico can move a Texas 14-year-old onto hormones over a long weekend, but it cannot teach a New Mexico fourth-grader to read. It’s quick with what is immediate and irreversible, and slow with what is ordinary and lasting: the education that actually prepares a child for a life.

When I told my own story — a teenager chewed up and spat out by the gender-affirmation pipeline — it made a difference. People have stopped me at local coffee shops and written to say how learning about my healing gave them hope, or even influenced them to make different decisions in their own lives. In 2023, I sued the providers responsible for my care. After one tried to use my state’s tight statute of limitations to escape accountability, the Texas Supreme Court ruled this year that my case could proceed on its merits, underscoring the unique nature of “gender-affirming” harm.

We need more stories from New Mexico — more families willing to say what we know is happening, more reporters willing to follow the road where Planned Parenthood leads. Right now, the state shovels tax dollars into a failing school system, proclaims its devotion to all New Mexicans, and enables their harm — while inviting the rest of the country to share in it.

A state that can’t teach its own children to read is in no position to dictate best practices. And a child never taught to read may never learn enough to question it. New Mexico owes its kids a classroom, not science fiction or an artificially complicated life.

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Soren Aldaco is an Independent Women ambassador and subject-matter expert on issues of identity, health, and wellbeing. Her story of transition and detransition was first featured in IW Features’ “Identity Crisis” series.

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Inside New Mexico’s Off-Grid Gender Border Pipeline