Trans medicine rundown§

If “genital mutilation of children” were the first thing you ever heard about trans healthcare, you might think the child abuse argument had a point. That’s intentional; this rhetoric relies on you focusing on the harms it discusses instead of checking to see if the point they’re making is legitimate. It isn’t.

I want to talk more about some of the abject cruelty seen in anti-trans legislation, but to understand how divorced from reality it is you’ll need a quick medical primer. You know, facts.

While there are slight variances in the Standards of Care documents published by different organizations, the American Psychological Association, The Endocrine Society, The Pediatric Endocrine Society, The World Professional Association for Transgender Health, The American Collages of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, The Center for Disease Control and more (MJA, AAP, AMA, the APA again…) agree that:

• Nonstereotypical gender expression is not pathological (relating to or caused by disease) per se and should not be treated as such
• Gender dysphoria in adults should be treated progressively by mental health counselling, non-medical social steps, hormone therapy, and finally surgery if necessary.
• Fully-reversible treatments (hormone blockers) are preferable to semi-reversible treatments and irreversible treatments (surgery), and all patients should be counselled on options before beginning any treatment (which requires informed consent)
• Medical intervention for transgender youth and adults is effective, safe (when appropriately monitored), and has been established as the medical standard of care
• Treatment plans put together by qualified doctors in cooperation with informed patients suffering from gender dysphoria are medically necessary, not cosmetic or optional
• Failure to treat gender dysphoria is known to induce severe health risks far in excess³ of the risks associated with treatment
• Conversion therapy or other direct hostility toward the patient was attempted in the past but is now known to be both ineffective and extremely dangerous (conversion therapy is often literal torture)

As is the case with all medicine, policy for minors is more cautious:

• Extra emphasis is placed on the importance of requiring evaluations before beginning any treatment, “to ensure patients make a fully informed decision that protects their future well-being“
• Psychotherapy (affirming) is recommended to reducing distress related the gender dysphoria and ameliorating any other psychosocial difficulties
• Children in particular should not be pressured to express their gender in a way contrary to their self-identification
• If a minor is determined to need physical treatment, fully reversible hormone blockers should be used to temporarily prevent the development of sex characteristics that are difficult or impossible to reverse in the future
  • Hormone suppression is a temporary process and does not inevitably lead to pursuing sex reassignment
  • Studies show that young children with gender dysphoria are less likely to have that continue throughout adulthood than adults: see 2001 Cohen-Kettenis letter and studies cited therein
• Withholding treatment (specifically puberty suppression) is not a neutral option. Puberty suppression is specifically used to prevent the need for more serious treatment or surgery later in life
• Gender-affirming genital surgery should never be be carried out on minors
  • Genital surgery is never to be given to patients under the age of majority.
  • Even for adults there are strict limits on this; dysphoria must be diagnosed, well-documented, and persistent. Patients must already be living in their gender role for more than a year to even be candidates for surgery (although some argue these restrictions are too strict for adults giving informed consent)

Trans children are treated differently than trans adults, they’re treated with much more care and caution. But for adults, too, the emphasis is on caution through. (So much so that, in practice, it’s often difficult for even adults to get prescriptive care, even after years of diagnosis and treatment.)

Again, Gender-affirming genital surgery is not performed on minors. For it to be would be medical malpractice, as has already been clearly established by the mainstream medical community. And even in adults it is well understood that it is only for a subset of patients that “relief from gender dysphoria cannot be achieved without modification of their primary and/or secondary sex characteristics to establish greater congruence with their gender identity.” In other words, nobody is running around snipping things off willy-nilly.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸@RepMTG

We must do everything we can to prevent Dr. Dick Levine’s pre-teen #WeenieChop

Mon Jul 18 18:55:32 +0000 2022

The people who say otherwise are bold-faced liars.

What is recommended for minors suffering from dysphoria — after consultation and diagnosis, of course — are puberty blockers. Puberty blockers have been used safely to delay puberty since 1981, with 30 years of data showing them to be safe and effective. Cisgendered children with have been treated for puberty blockers for decades without any serious concerns about sterilization. (Who would toss around baseless claims about sterilization? Just you wait!)

They are especially valuable in trans healthcare; see the famous Cohen-Kettenis, P. T., & van Goozen, S. H. M. (1998). Pubertal delay as an aid in diagnosis and treatment of a transsexual adolescent. European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 7(4), 246–248. paper about a twelve-year-old who wrote a suicide note explaining how he’d rather die than be forced to go through the wrong puberty. One of the latest studies, published just February of this year, shows that in a sample group of adolescents, “receipt of gender-affirming care, including puberty blockers and gender-affirming hormones, was associated with 60% lower odds of moderate or severe depression and 73% lower odds of suicidality over a 12-month follow-up”. A 73% reduction in suicidality. That’s astonishing. And that’s the truly crucial thing: the deaths caused by dysphoria are suicides, and medical care reduces suicide across the board.

Speaking of the ol’ snip-snip, that’s not what trans healthcare looks like for adults, either. Some people do get cosmetic surgery, but in most cases for fully transitioned adults, “trans healthcare” looks like a sustained regimen of painful hormone shots. Trans people can’t just get a one-off operation, they need a continuous regimen of care, somewhat parallel to the diabetics who require insulin to self-regulate. I say this to point out two things. First, that this treatment is difficult and physically taxing for the patient. It’s not fun and it’s not minor; people are only going on this medicine because they need it. But second, I want to point out that transgender adults need continuous care. Banning trans medical care doesn’t just stop people from transitioning, it cripples the entire trans population overnight. That’s why attacking healthcare is so dangerous, but it’s also what makes them such attractive targets to the genocidalists who want the trans population in agony and — really — want the mass suicides such a ban induces.

I really can’t emphasize this enough: literally all relevant major medical organizations disagree entirely with the anti-trans agenda and its talking points. The republican anti-trans stance in particular seems almost antagonistic towards science in general, as part of a general mistrust of intellectuality.

So now, with reality firmly behind us, back to our story where everyone involved deliberately ignores all this, because lawmakers’ feelings don’t care about facts.

Texas Opinion No. KP-0401§

The Texas KP-0401 opinion is a blatant example of angry anti-science law, and the one nearest to my heart. It also represents both the spirit of the genocidal ideology and the willingness of the assailants to write awful law in order to achieve their ideological goals.

It started August 6, 2021, when Governor Greg Abbott (R, governor since 2015) wrote the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) asking them to clarify whether — under current state law — gender reassignment surgery constituted child abuse. DFPS commissioner Jamie Masters replied August 11 in a letter that concludes reassignment surgery is abuse when not medically necessary, which is mostly correct. This letter only seems concerned with gender reassignment surgery (so that fun word “mutilation” can be thrown around as much as possible), and not other trans healthcare practices.

At this point, Rep. Matt Krause(R) enters. You might remember Krause as the man who wrote the demand that Texas schools audit and report the physical locations of everything on his manifesto-like list of books about topics he personally dislikes, like human rights and women. He’s also the one who requested an opinion from AG Ken Paxton as to whether Texas “has the sovereign power to defend itself from invasion” as an approach to border security (because Operation Lone Star had too much oversight for him, I guess), or his support for nationalist historical revisionism. Matt’s true passion, though, is the Gays. Before his appointment, Matt worked with a group identified by the Southern Poverty Center as being anti-LGBTQ extremist organizations and continues to push their ideology from office with his legal activism to strongly regulate areas relating to gender and sexuality, including pushes to expand Texas’s already-absurd obscenity laws. He’s a crazy person, but also completely representative of the Texas republican party.

This Matt Krause wrote another request (he writes many) to Ken Paxton arguing for a formal expansion of the notion of child abuse to include gender reassignment procedures. Paxton responded on February the 21st by writing the now-infamous KP-0401 opinion, which more specifically advises that a broad range of medical treatment for gender dysphoria (explicitly including non-surgical medication and procedures that risk, but do not intentionally induce, infertility, and even implicitly including therapy) categorically constitute child abuse. Note the escalation.

Attorney General Ken Paxton@KenPaxtonTX

Sex-change operations and puberty blockers prescribed to kids is “child abuse” under Texas law.

These procedures are monstrous and tragic. “I’ll do everything I can to protect against those who take advantage of and harm young Texans. texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/…

Mon Feb 21 21:30:40 +0000 2022

KP-0401 is 13 pages, relatively long for a AG opinion. It primarily consists of rhetorical prose and standard anti-trans assertions mixed with the childbirth-fetishistic ideas also seen in the Texan anti-abortion movement. (See also S.B. 8, etc.) The opinion derides the choice to “destroy a fully functioning sex organ” and spends an immense amount of time lauding the danger posed to the right to procreate. It even goes so low as to wield historical eugenicist campaigns against minority groups as an argument in favour of preventing sterilization procedures even — as in this case — when medically advisable. Yes, really: one of his key arguments for law denying individuals bodily autonomy is the history of governments denying individuals bodily autonomy: “violations”, in his own words.

Paxton directly compares parents of trans children, who he calls facilitators throughout, to abusers a la Munchausen by proxy, and uses that to argue for a suspension of the parent’s right to consent to a child’s medical treatment for this particular treatment.

The lip service paid to importance of consent is a familiar little hoax. Consent should be a crucial issue to consider, one of the most important when discussing any medical treatment. But in regards to trans healthcare, anti-trans legislators’ concerns are never really about the patient’s consent or anyone else’s. To the ideologue, “[Person X] should choose” is a card that to play when that would make the choice you want made. If you think they’d make a different decision than you, well, it can’t be a matter of consent anymore, you have to argue it’s abuse. Any reasonable conversation about an established medical treatment would need to divide consent somewhere between the patient, their guardians, and the prescribing physician. Paxton doesn’t trust any of those parties to always prevent gender transition — which, again, is his only real goal here — so he grants the responsibility of consent to the state, instead of anyone involved. It’s a sham.

Many of the assertions in the opinion are blatant factual inaccuracies, even in addition to the deceit that child genital surgery was ever seriously an issue in the first place. For example, Paxton lists an increased risk of mental health issue as a dangerous side-effect of transitioning, when the studies overwhelmingly show the opposite. The UCLA Suicide Risk and Prevention for Transgender People: Summary of Research Findings - September 2021 found that factors related to not transitioning — religious and social rejection, conversion therapy, discrimination — drastically increased suicidal tendency. There has been an enormous amount of serious, peer-reviewed medical research on this issue, and there is no evidence to suggest the act of transitioning is harmful to mental health. But, in case you thought there might have been even the slightest amount of sincere care about suicide, after this was published Texas removed information about its trans suicide prevention hotline from is website. It’s… really not subtle.

Joss Prior 🌈Chemically altered...🌈@joss_prior

Replying to joss_prior:

Like many others, the point of transition arrived as a 'fuck it, I may as well give it a try if I'm thinking of ending it, whats worse than that' moment.

Transition brought me the peace of mind, I thought impossible to experience.

3/

Sat Sep 18 20:10:18 +0000 2021

This was done — rather conspicuously — immediately before the Texas primary elections and the relatively competitive AG race. Paxton won by a wide margin despite (or, realistically, due in part to) having an active indictment for multiple counts of first-degree securities fraud, being endorsed by insurrection leader Donald Trump, and violating Texas public records law by refusing to turn over documents relating to January 6th. Gillian Branstetter of the ACLU described the Texas election as a “race to the bottom on trans rights”, commenting on how anti-trans policy is exceedingly popular among Texas republican voters.

This doesn’t come as a surprise to Texas GOP leadership: several different reporters reported hearing on a call that attacking trans families was polling at 75%-80%:

J. David Goodman@jdavidgoodman

NEW: The campaign of @GregAbbott_TX sees child abuse investigations for the parents of transgender children as a political winner

“That is a 75, 80 percent winner," says @granitewinger, his campaign strategist in a call with reporters. Says Democrats are "are out of touch.”

Wed Mar 02 16:20:44 +0000 2022

Patrick Svitek@PatrickSvitek

Replying to PatrickSvitek:

Carney on Abbott's transgender care investigation order: "That is a 75-80% winner. ... That is a winning issue. Texans have common sense."

"This is why the Democrats across the country are out of touch."

Wed Mar 02 16:39:54 +0000 2022

David Weigel@daveweigel

On #TXGov call, I asked Abbott campaign about running on his "gender-affirming care = child abuse" order.

"That is a 75-80% winner," said @granitewinger. "I don't believe even O'Rourke would think that if a parent caught off the hand of their kid, that would not be child abuse."

Wed Mar 02 16:39:59 +0000 2022

Between February 21st and the 22nd, there was optimism from some due to the fact that this was a nonbinding interpretation of existing law, and did not constitute any sort of new legislation. But that analysis fails to see how the letter and opinion and later the executive order exist as meditated pieces of a political movement. The goal was eradication of trans people, and the goal will continue to be eradication of trans people. None of it is happening in a liberal constitutional vacuum.

Febuary 22nd, one day after the Paxton opinion, Greg Abbott wrote DFPS commissioner Jamie Masters instructing them to “conduct a prompt and thorough investigation of any reported instances of these abusive procedures in the State of Texas”, where the antecedent of “these abusive procedures” explicitly includes puberty blocking drugs (which, again, is not abuse, and is in fact the universally recommended treatment).

Note that Abbott called this a “ruling” which isn’t true — it’s a nonbinding opinion issued by the AG. In fact, it’s so not a law that the hyper-partisan Senate Bill 1646 which would have codified the policy that trans healthcare is child abuse into actual law went up before the Texas senate and failed repeatedly over the course of two days before dying, because literally only republicans would vote for it.

Which, actually, looking at it now, I got angry about way back when it was first introduced, apparently.

Florida§

In Florida the most obvious anti-trans legislation is the Don’t Say Gay bill, forcing schools to discriminate against trans youth. It’s already having serious impacts on children: according to reports Orange County teachers will be required to remove stickers of support and will be banned from wearing any pride-supporting clothing, including lanyards the district itself distributed just one year prior. (This is all wildly contrary to any notion of free speech, but as I continue to remind, the blatant hypocrisy is to be expected here.) Teachers will be forced to report students’ health concerns to their parents without the consent of the child, and faculty will be required to use the pronouns “assigned at birth” (which pronouns aren’t, but whatever) regardless of the wishes of teacher, parents, or children. But this bill has had extensive coverage already, so I won’t rehash the details further.

But on June 2, right off the heels of its anti-LGBTQ Don’t Say Gay victory, Florida released a press release declaring all gender affirming care to be “experimental” so that trans health care would no longer be covered under Medicaid. (Gender affirming care is, of course, not experimental; this is a lie. The corpus on gender transition, including minors, includes more than 90 years of scientific research and best-selling medical books published as far bask as 1966.) While this doesn’t yet ban healthcare for trans adults outright, it explicitly lays out the groundwork and makes it clear that it intends to do so (see page 38), with restrictions on private insurance (disallowing private health insurance from covering treatment) as a next policy step.

What’s interesting about the Florida Medicaid decision is that it claims to be based on science. It’s filled with links to scientific sources that come to the same conclusions it does. It also points out the US Department of Health and Human Services guidance has some specific problems, which it links a rebuttal of.

So what’s going on here? This seems almost credible. Look at all those science words! Maybe I got this whole thing wrong, and it’s the gays who were the baddies the whole time. Instead of just guessing though, let’s actually look.

Federal law§

Most of the anti-trans laws we see are at the state level, but there are some federal pushes. (So much for states’ rights to make their own laws, huh? You guessed it, that’s not a real principle republicans hold either.)

The “Protecting Children From Experimentation Act of 2021”, sponsored by 21 republicans and 0 democrats, is a simple but extreme bill that would unequivocally criminalize all gender care for minors everywhere in the US:

Whoever knowingly performs any gender reassignment medical intervention on a minor shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.

This includes criminalizing the use of the puberty blockers I discussed earlier, which makes this a proactive choice to subject trans adolescents as old as 17 to the wrong puberty, even if they have medical and parental concurrence. This arguably also criminalizes “social transition” and simple psychological therapies, as states try to argue that affirming counselling is child abuse.

The “Empower Parents to Protect Their Kids Act of 2022”… god damn, that title. HB8170 accuses school districts of “violating parental and familial rights by encouraging or instructing staff to deceive or withhold information parents” by having (good) policies that treat student health information with confidentiality, and in some cases not exposing it to people likely to abuse the children if their confidentiality were violated. I have more to say about the “parents’ rights” angle, but I’ll come back around to that. The proposed law requires school employees to not “facilitate, encourage, or coerce students to withhold information from their parents regarding the student’s “gender transition” or the student’s purported “gender identity”, where the student’s purported “gender identity” is incongruous with the student’s biological sex.”

As usual, we have the telltale signs of angry law, like special provisions exempting a need to seek administrative remedy, so parents can sue without even attempting to resolve disputes in good faith. You’ll also see some deliberately ambiguous wording there. What involves “facilitating” a child keeping a secret from their parents? Are teachers required to interrogate children? Where does it end? (It doesn’t.) Astonishingly, this law defines the “designated violations” that constitute grounds for a suit as including perceived threats to possibly violate the law in the future. If you think a teacher might, someday, not tell a boy’s mom about a flower he drew in his margins, that’s grounds for a suit under this rule.

The bill blames “powerful teachers unions and activist organizations” [sic] for allowing and encouraging “an experimental social and psychological intervention” (lie) “that has immediate effects on a child’s psychology and a high likelihood of changing the life path of a child”. This is a lie and republicans know it: when they do occasionally cherry-pick science, they grab the factoid that early social experimentation is usually reversed. Experimenting with self-expression does not somehow lock you into a track, because people are responsible for themselves. Which is something you would think republicans believed if they believed anything, but they don’t.

If you look through the language you’ll see the usual mess of rhetoric. “Irreversible consequences” is there. At one point in the preamble the bill just asserts “Any policies that attempt to circumvent parental authority are a violation of parents’ constitutionally protected rights to direct the care, custody, and upbringing of their children as recognized by the Supreme Court” which a) no, and b) they literally just assert that and move on. No explanations, no limits on “parental authority”, certainly no referenced court case establishing precedent that they’re demanding exists. It’s just a garbage fire.

This is another bill that lumps “social transition” in with the kinds of behaviour it wants to eliminate. This polices gender roles, including clothing, hair, names, nicknames, voice, class choice, handwriting, friendships, occupation choice… there are limits placed on this power, just carte blanche for schools to demand control over children’s behaviour in service of eradicating trans kids.

But what happens if a kid is trans at a school? Well fuck me, the school has to pay for the child’s complete and successful conversion therapy.

1 2 3 4

(4) NATURE OF RELIEF.—In an action under this section, the court shall grant— (A) all appropriate relief, including injunctive relief and declaratory relief; (B) to a prevailing plaintiff, reasonable attorneys’ fees and litigation costs; and (C) payment for treatments or therapy needed to repair harm to the child perpetuated by pursuit of "gender transition" determined necessary by the parent and the child’s medical providers.

I have no words. Or, I really wish I didn’t have to have words, but here I am two months into a writing project, so I guess I have to remind you that conversion therapy is harmful, causes emotional [and] physical harm to LGBT individuals, particularly adolescents or young persons and has little or no potential for achieving changes in orientation¹.

Conversion is sold to parents as a miracle cure to turn LGBTQ children into the straight, cis, “normal” children the parents wish they had had instead. In practice, conversion therapy is literally administered torture and the only change it makes to people is inflicting intense psychological trauma. Conversion therapy is abuse, torture, an atrocity. It also doesn’t work, which in context of this bill, I guess, means schools have to keep paying to torture the trans kid until they die.

There’s a great bit in the deposition of Stephen Levine for this. Conversion therapy advocate Stephen Levine is a professional expert witness hired by various states to argue for anti-trans policies. This deposition revealed he was paid $5,000 — paid, not a grant — to publish articles against informed consent by… The Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine, as part of an attempt to hijack the Cochrane review committees for puberty blockers and HRT. You’ll remember SEGM as the non-NIH fringe anti-trans extremist organization from Aviva Stahl’s “Meet The “Fringe Extremists” Pushing Flawed Science To Target Trans Kids”.

In his deposition, Levine described under oath how conversion therapy sells because “Parents would very much like me to be able to return their child efficiently and quickly to a cis state” and it’s “premised on the notion that there’s a way to dissuade someone from being transgender so that they don’t have these outcomes”. But then, he admitted in the same disposition that “To my knowledge, there is no evidence beyond anecdotal reports that psychotherapy can enable a return to male identification for genetically male boys, adolescents, and men, or return to female identification for genetically female girls, adolescents, and women.” It’s a scam. It’s torturing children and selling it to parents as hope.

The state requiring it like this is hideous abuse to the child, but it also encourages parents’ delusion that being trans is a pathological condition, which in turn encourages them to abuse their child. This clause is sickening and horrific, but that’s par. The bar is the floor, here.

Many of these and other federal bills are introduced with no chance of passing. It’s symbolic, but it isn’t just symbolic; it pushes these ideas into mainstream discourse and shifts the Overton Window towards formally codifying anti-trans discrimination into public policy.

Just a whole bunch more§

Those are some high-profile examples, but there are just too many for me to go in depth on the rest. Here’s a super-brief overview of what casual research turned out:

Alabama and Idaho advancing bills to make it a felony for doctors to provide trans medical care, with sentences of 10 years and life, respectively. More lies here about genital mutilation surgery and denying medical standards. (Already challenged by the justice dept.)

Proposed Oklahoma book-banning bill, fining teachers a minimum of $10,000 to be paid out-of-pocket if they “promote positions in opposition to closely held religious beliefs of the student”, which would include teaching LGBT issues as well as evolution and sex-ed. Bill’s author and anti-gender book banner Rob Standridge describes it as an emergency remedy “immediately necessary for the preservation of the public peace, health or safety.” Oklahoma already engages this kind of classroom policing, including firing a teacher for displaying an array of flags that included a pride flag. Standridge previously advocated and passed law banning school mask and covid vaccine requirements, because it’s critical to “protect health choice”.

North Carolina excluded trans healthcare from state healthcare plans, although this was found in court to be unconstitutional discrimination on the basis of sex, as well as a Title VII violation. The state of North Carolina brought in fake expert Paul Hruz to preach his assumptions as “expert testimony”, but the court found him to be unqualified to make any sort of judgement about “the diagnosis of gender dysphoria, the DSM, gender dysphoria’s potential causes, the likelihood that a patient will “desist”, or the efficacy of mental health treatments.” In particular, Hruz peddled the “social contagion” conspiracy theory, which I’ll discuss more later. Other state testimony from multiple sources was evaluated to be “conspiratorial accusations … nothing more than rank speculation designed to distract or inflame the jury and has no business in expert testimony” and dismissed.

Parents sued a Massachusetts school district for violating those parents’ “sincerely held religious belief” that parents have the right to exclusively teach “adherence to a Biblical understanding of male and female and standards of behavior.” The sin the school allegedly committed was instructing counsellors not to discuss students’ confidential thoughts about gender identity with their parents without the student’s consent, because of how frequently outing minors triggers actual child abuse.

Backed by anti-lgbtq groups like The Family Council, Arkansas enacted a ban on transgender youth medical care overriding republican governor Asa Hutchinson’s veto. As Hutchinson rightly assessed, “This puts a very vulnerable population in a more difficult position” and the state should not “interrupt treatment that the parents had agreed to, the patient had agreed to and the physician recommended.” Hutchinson said he would have signed it if it was limited to surgery, but the bill covered all trans healthcare, including safe therapies patients were already on. Instead of writing a “more restrained approach that allows a thoughtful study of the science and ethics surrounding the issue before acting”, as the Governor requested, the republican legislators simply overrode the veto and forced the law through. After an ACLU suit, Judge Jay Moody issued an injunction because, in his words, “to pull this care midstream from these patients, or minors, would cause irreparable harm”. This was a particularly brutal session for individual medical rights. More coverage and rebuttal in Scientific American.

Another veto override in Utah with HB0011, which establishes a new commission to segregate children athletes based on gender and specifically mandates them to prevent “a student of the male sex from competing against another school on a team designated for female students”. It also carves out special immunity for the adults now sexually evaluating underaged girls on behalf of the state, because they need it. Governor Spencer J Cox wrote a thoughtful letter explaining the veto, saying “Rarely has so much fear and anger been directed at so few,” and “I want [trans children] to live,” but the legislature dismissed him and his concerns so completely that they overturned the veto on the very same day.

Yet another veto override in Indiana where the republican supermajority forced a scholastic sports ban through even when there hadn’t been a single case of a transgender student participating. Republican governor Eric Holcomb (a staunch conservative!) vetoed the bill citing the lack of a real problem, saying “After thorough review, I find no evidence to support either claim even if I support the overall goal”, but legislators overrode the veto.

Texas Superintendent Jeremy Glenn demanding librarians pull books educating people about sexuality or transgender people. He didn’t hide behind the usual “pornographic” go-to, though: he made it clear that this was entirely ideologically driven. “Here in this community, we’re going to be conservative. … And I’m going to take it a step further with you, there are two genders. There’s male, and there’s female. … I don’t have any issues with what people want to believe, but there’s no place for it in our libraries.” But of course, in his mind, this was somehow pushing back against “partisan politics”, which makes sense when you lie hard as hard about what “partisan” means as republicans do.

In Virginia, republican representatives Tim Anderson and Tommy Altman sued Oni Press and Maia Kobabe over their graphic novel, GENDER QUEER. The suit alleged it violated an unconstitutional and intentionally ambiguous obscenity law, with the only grounds being that it was “obscene for restricted viewing by minors” with no actual complaint or reason given in the motion. (Note here how intentionally ambiguously written laws give enforcers vastly increased powers to harass people on a discretionary basis while allowing people in the ingroup or otherwise powerful to skirt on loopholes.) This was after the graphic novel was singled out for scrutiny by our friend Matt Krause. Lawyers were clear that these materials do not fall under “obscene materials” under any interpretation of the law. The complaint itself fails to show cause and grossly mischaracterizes the nature and subject of the book and fails to meet the law’s own criteria on many points. This is the same complaint which names the wrong party in the complaint and — I kid you not — misspells “obscenity” in the title of the petition as “Obsenity”. Not big readers, this bunch.

Emboldened by the atrocious Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, Alabama AG Steve Marshall (R) pushed for the federal court to allow the state’s ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth using the legal basis in Dobbs that such care is not constitutionally protected, because it’s not “deeply rooted” in the nation’s history. The idea that a right must have historical grounding to be constitutionally protected is absurd, of course: the constitution doesn’t enumerate rights, but the same faulty logic being used to force through the ideologically-driven war on abortion is being used, almost immediately, in fights for other medical rights, where a rule by judges is substituted for the rule of law. This terrible rationale is now being used to lay a legal framework for the state to forcibly medically de-transition both teenagers and adults.

dev@devweb666

Replying to devweb666:

TW: suicide. to put it bluntly, if I lost access to hormone therapy i would probably kms. I havent considered suicide once since my transition but the prospect of losing access to hormones is a monumental threat to my existence

Tue Jun 07 15:30:35 +0000 2022

In the national sphere, republican senator Roger Marshall is threatens to block school meal funding over transgender policy: literally, keeping food from children and blaming it on the gays. This is in response to a Biden policy banning discrimination against LGBTQ students in schools who receive federal funding. Republicans are twisting this incredibly low bar for a standard of care into Biden “trying to deny school lunch programs for states that don’t do transgender ideology in the schools”, which is why they have to… make sure government discrimination against the kind of children they don’t like is legal, apparently.

Over in merry old wherever, the NHS commissioner suspects there might be evidence of “regret” in transitioning children — there super isn’t, by the way, regret rates are < 1% — so they’re turning over the medical records of minors to an independent group to comb through them and find ammunition. There is data for this, of course, but its findings aren’t what the NHS wants to see. And they’re not willing to do an ethical study where subjects “consent” to researchers exposing their private medical records, so instead they’ve carved out an exception to medical confidentiality laws in order to expose this particularly vulnerable group. Of course, this practice of violating medical ethics and the law to further a political agenda opens up a door to enormous amounts of future abuse, including seizure of medical records to prosecute sodomy laws or criminalize abortion. But that doesn’t stop the ruthless.

See also:

• Supreme Court Lets Catholic Group Exclude LGBTQ Foster Parents, where laws don’t apply to religious groups, so long as they’re violating the law at the expense of the LGBTQ community.
• Why Transgender Girls Are Suddenly the G.O.P.’s Culture-War Focus
  • “These efforts appear to be far more slick, and far more organized,” said Elizabeth A. Skarin of the American Civil Liberties Union of South Dakota, which opposes the bill.
  • South Dakota is just one of a growing number of states where Republicans are diving into a culture war clash that seems to have come out of nowhere. It has been brought about by a coordinated and poll-tested campaign by social conservative organizations like the American Principles Project and Concerned Women for America, which say they are determined to move forward with what may be one of their last footholds in the fight against expanding L.G.B.T.Q. rights.
• Prohibiting Gender-Affirming Medical Care for Youth - UCLA School of Law March 2022
  • Six states also include penalties for parents who facilitate minors’ access to gender-affirming medical care.
  • About half the bills would bar insurance providers from offering coverage for gender-affirming care.
  • A bill in Missouri would attempt classify gender-affirming care as child abuse similar to the order recently issued in Texas.
  • In total, more than a third of the 150,000 transgender youth ages 13-17 in the U.S. live in the 15 states that have restricted access to gender-affirming care or are currently considering laws that would do so
• UCLA brief - Prohibiting Gender-Affirming Medical Care for Youth
  • 15 states have restricted access to gender-affirming care or are currently considering laws that would do so.
  • The bills carry severe penalties for health care providers, and sometimes families, who provide or seek out gender-affirming care for minors.
  • In five states, bills would prohibit gender-affirming care by or in government-owned or operated facilities, and by individual providers employed by government entities.
  • In four states, bills would exclude gender-affirming care as a tax-deductible health care expense

I like the summary in Dr. Jack Turban’s What South Dakota Doesn’t Get About Transgender Children:

In the past, doctors tried to force [trans people] to be cisgender, to identify with the sex they were assigned at birth. New research shows that this approach is associated with their attempting suicide. Having learned from these mistakes, we now follow new protocols that guide us to accept and affirm transgender youths in their transgender identities.

Unfortunately, huge shifts in medical literature do not always make their way to politicians. While there is broad consensus among doctors that these affirmative medical protocols are important, legislators in several states are planning to make this medical care illegal. …

The bills are about medical care, but the state representatives sponsoring them seem unfazed by the fact that all relevant major medical organizations disagree with them. … The medical profession has made it clear: This kind of legislation is dangerous and should not become law.

But it does become law. It became law, it’s becoming law, and it will become law. It’s being pushed through by ideologues who don’t care about the danger: harm done to the ingroup is an acceptable loss, and harm done to trans people was always the point.

Model Law§

We know what policies the Christian nationalists pushing these laws want look like too, not just what they’ve been able to get on the books so far. This is the National Right to Life Committee’s model legislation for “post-roe” sexual law: NRLC Post-Roe Model Abortion Law. And, wow, did I call the Texas GOP document bad? This is a blood-curdlingly horrific document that advocates for a full-blown police surveillance state to eradicate the practice of abortion. It goes as far as hunting down anyone who even suggests online that abortion is legitimate; there is no decency and there are no boundaries.

Leah McElrath 🏳️‍🌈@leahmcelrath

Replying to leahmcelrath:

This child’s suicide attempt?

The mass murder in Buffalo?

These are outcomes the GOP is hoping for with their legislation and rhetoric.

They want everyone not white, heterosexual, and gender-conforming not to exist or, at a minimum, to be too frightened to demand civil rights.

Wed Jun 08 23:23:25 +0000 2022

What we’re witnessing is a legal system entirely divorced from both reality and decency, using its power to transform conspiratorial media tropes into actionable criminal law.

So wait, what’s the goal? Is this about a threat to culture, or is it about irreversible medical procedures? Or medical consent, or child abuse? It’s not about any of that. It’s about power. It’s trans genocide.