Mark Waddington, 69, of Montana and formerly of Woonsocket, passed away on March 1, 2023.

Funeral service will be held at 11 a.m. on Friday, March 10, at the First United Methodist Church, Miles City, Mont. A graveside service with full military honors will follow at the Custer County Cemetery, Miles City, Mont. Visitation will be held from 4-6 p.m. on Thursday, March 9, at the Stevenson and Sons Funeral Homes, Miles City, Mont.

I am disappointed but unsurprised after reading Rep. Krohmer’s last column, in which he discusses his reasons for voting for HB 1080. His choice of words in banning puberty blockers “to protect children from … [being] encouraged to change their gender” shows what a place of ignorance Krohmer is coming from. I can understand the fear of allowing minors to undergo transition surgery because, like any surgery, there’s risk, and it’s an irreversible step. (Though, we seem to have no problem with the surgical removal of healthy tissue when it comes to things like circumcision, nor do we take issue changing a child’s sex when they are born intersex.) However, to ban puberty blockers so that someone, minor or no, can’t choose to be transgender is the same mentality as those who think people choose to be gay. It’s not a choice.

Gender dysphoria, described as significant distress or impairment related to gender incongruence, is listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It, like COVID, is real, whether you want to believe it or not. I can’t speak for the people Krohmer mentioned, who claim to have transitioned and then detransitioned, but there are far more trans people who needed and are satisfied with their treatment. According to a 2021 article looking at 27 studies of regret after gender-affirmation surgeries, the percentage of 7,928 trans people who regretted transitioning was less than one percent.

If you’re still concerned after seeing those numbers, there is still no excuse for putting puberty blockers on this bill. According to Mayo Clinic’s website, puberty blockers can be stopped at any time should the adolescent and medical professional deem that the minor isn’t truly trans, and puberty will continue as normal. 

Without any sort of gender-affirming care, trans adolescents can turn to self-harm or even suicide. So, by disallowing treatment, can you truly say you care about these children?

The Sanborn Weekly Journal staff, which includes, Parker, Rachel and I, would like to thank all of the many people, who are regular contributors, and our weekly columnists, who are so wonderful about helping us fill pages to inform and entertain our readers each week. We know it is a lot of work to put together articles or columns each week or when events occur, but as a small-town newspaper, we wouldn’t be able to put the paper together every week without the help of many, including Dvonne Hansen, Sue Larson, Leora Christian, Beverly Johnson, Dee Baysinger, Sandi Ruml, Judy Wormstadt, Paula Linke, Sherryl Rankin, Janet Maeschen, Vicki Berg Linke and Rick George. Thank you to all the school personnel who make sure we have events covered and help us get pictures of things happening if there are events we don’t get to or students who need to be recognized for something. Thank you to Sheriff Tom Fridley and his staff and TC Coulthard, who have all been so helpful in providing information about things happening in our county where law enforcement or fire fighters have been needed for help.

We also want to thank all our loyal advertisers because, without advertising dollars, we truly wouldn’t be able to publish the paper we work so hard on each week. As businesses close, and budgets get tight, we try to keep our prices as reasonable as possible, and we give deals to clients who will commit to advertising on a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly basis if they commit to at least three months of advertising. Contact us so we can work something out for you, especially if you like seeing the paper. Without advertising, we can’t produce this creative work of art.

Our paper has grown over the past few years, and so has our subscription list. After an area paper decided to go to two days a week of print copies, our list of subscribers increased by close to 20 percent. We had a columnist who just started writing for us this summer who stated that she had no idea how many people read the paper until she started having people stop her on the street to tell her how much they enjoy her column, and one reader told her they cut out her column to save for reference for their own work. So, to those of you who say no one reads the paper anymore, I say, just because you don’t read the paper, doesn’t mean no one reads the paper. We know all too well when we make a disastrous mistake because several people are kind enough to point it out to us, and when something happens in the area that we didn’t know about, we get many questions about why it wasn’t covered in the paper, so we know people are reading our paper.

I realize that the printed newspaper isn’t the main source of information for most people that it used to be, but it is still a vital part of a thriving community. In our case, we are an important part to a few communities, not just one. Students at both schools in the county love to see me come and always ask if their picture is going to be in the paper. We are looking into starting an e-edition, but that will take a while, so in the meantime, we will continue as print only, which seems to be fine with most readers. We have gotten so many compliments on how well we put the paper together, we lost count, and people do comment to us on specific things, so we know many of you are reading carefully and not just skimming or looking at the pictures.

We also know that most people looking for a job don’t normally think to go to the newspaper, but we know that our readers discuss things that are posted in the paper, so people are made aware of job openings by word of mouth, and that all starts with us being a central location to have something posted. Whether it is to find out who has employment opportunities, who scored the most points in a game, what time the poker tournament starts, what happened at the most recent county commissioners’ meeting or who went to coffee last week, people are looking for information in our paper. So, I will say it again; we have many ways to prove people are reading our paper, and if someone tells you that no one reads the paper anymore, the response to that is, “Well, they should be reading the paper because anyone who isn’t is missing out.”