Republicans are increasingly moving towards the criminalization, incarceration, and eventual extermination of America's transgender folks, and they're not hiding this fact in the least.
South Dakota is set to be the latest state to ban gender-affirming health care for transgender youth after state senators on Thursday voted to send a measure barring minors from accessing certain medications and procedures to Republican Gov. Kristi Noem, who has signaled she will sign the bill into law.
South Dakota’s House Bill 1080, introduced in January by state Republican Rep. Bethany Soye, seeks to prohibit state health care providers from “knowingly” prescribing puberty blockers or hormones or performing surgeries that “validate” a minor’s sex if it is inconsistent with the sex they were assigned at birth.
The bill includes exceptions for intersex youth, minors diagnosed with sexual development disorders, and minors that require treatment for an infection, injury, disease or disorder that has been “caused or exacerbated by” gender-affirming medical intervention.
Health care professionals who continue to provide treatment will have their medical licenses revoked, according to the bill, although physicians that have initiated a course of treatment for a minor patient prior to July 1 may “systematically reduce” that treatment through Dec. 31.
An amendment proposed Thursday by Sen. Tim Reed, one of just four Democrats in the South Dakota Senate, would have allowed transgender minors to have access to puberty blockers, which he said can help alleviate a child’s anxiety about their gender “so that counseling can begin.”
“Blockers have a place helping families navigate through an extremely difficult situation,” Reed said Thursday. “We need to be able to give these kids a chance.”
Reed’s amendment failed to pass with the support of just nine senators.
What trans folks are telling us is that Republicans will not stop with outlawing gender-affirming care for kids. We're already up to young adults age 25 in Utah and SC, and then it will be everyone, either explicitly, or more likely, by shutting down clinics and center that provide this care through de facto regulations, the way Texas and other states did with regulating abortion clinics to death.
Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah signed a bill on Saturday that blocks minors from receiving gender-transition health care, the first such measure in the country this year in what is expected to be a wave of legislation by state lawmakers to restrict transgender rights.
The law prohibits transgender youth in the state from receiving gender-affirming surgery and places an indefinite ban on hormone therapy, with limited exceptions.
Mr. Cox, a Republican, said in a statement that banning these treatments was necessary until more research could be done on their long-term effects.
“While we understand our words will be of little comfort to those who disagree with us, we sincerely hope that we can treat our transgender families with more love and respect as we work to better understand the science and consequences behind these procedures,” the governor said.
Leading medical groups, including the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, have rejected claims that gender-affirming care is harmful to transgender children or adults.
If you're noticing the same "Well we can't trust doctors, they lie to us!" justification for criminalizing gender-affirming care that Republicans are using with vaccines (and soon, medical abortion care for FDA-approved drugs that have been around for decades) it's because it's deliberate.
It goes "We have to protect X!" followed by "The science isn't settled!" followed by "The science is wrong, this has to be stopped!" followed by legislation criminalizing doctors, nurses, health care workers, clinicians, and everyone else involved.
Republican lawmakers are proposing bills aimed at how LGBTQ topics should be handled in Kentucky’s schools.
Republican lawmakers filed House Bill 173 Tuesday and Senate Bill 102 was filed Wednesday. The bills have nearly identical language. Senator Max Wise, R-Campbellsville, also filed Senate Bill 150, a similar bill.
He says SB 150 proposes three things.
One, it would require a district to notify parents when a student seeks out mental or physical health services. Two, a district must give parents a two-week notice and an opportunity to review materials for any curriculum related to human sexuality. Three, the bill proposes it would provide First Amendment protections to staff and students by ensuring no one is compelled or required to use pronouns that do not conform to a student’s biological sex.
“The time to protect our students is long past due in the Commonwealth of Kentucky,” said Sen. Wise. “As the former Education Committee Chairman, I’ve heard from parents, I’ve heard from administrators, those inside and outside of public education and from my own constituents, saying they are concerned where are educational priorities line up in Kentucky.”
Going after trans folks in order to "protect kids" is there to generate legal precedents and religious objections into state laws so that protections for marginalized groups can be dismantled across the board, for women, for Black, Hispanic and Asian groups, for other gay/lesbian folks, for non-Christian religions, and everyone else.
As I have tirelessly said for the last several years, the Republican goal is to eliminate the Civil Rights era and dominate America with white male Christian theocracy. Everyone else will be a provisional citizen as long as they remain "one of the good ones".
Over the past year, we have seen a sweeping and ferocious attack on the rights and dignity of transgender people across the country.
In states led by Republicans, conservative lawmakers have introduced or passed dozens of laws that would give religious exemptions for discrimination against transgender people, prohibit the use of bathrooms consistent with their gender identity and limit access to gender-affirming care.
In lashing out against L.G.B.T.Q. people, lawmakers in at least eight states have even gone as far as to introduce bans on “drag” performance that are so broad as to threaten the ability of gender-nonconforming people simply to exist in public.
Some of the most powerful Republicans in the country want to go even further. Donald Trump has promised to radically limit transgender rights if he is returned to the White House in 2024. In a video address to supporters, he said he would push Congress to pass a national ban on gender-affirming care for transgender youth and restrict Medicare and Medicaid funding for hospitals and medical professionals providing that care.
He wants to target transgender adults as well. “I will sign a new executive order instructing every federal agency to cease all programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age,” Trump said. “I will ask Congress to pass a bill establishing that the only genders recognized by the United States government are male and female, and they are assigned at birth.”
There is plenty to say about the reasoning and motivation for this attack — whether it comes from Trump, Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida or Gov. Greg Abbott in Texas — but the important thing to note, for now, is that it is a direct threat to the lives and livelihoods of transgender people. It’s the same for other L.G.B.T.Q. Americans, who once again find themselves in the cross-hairs of an aggressive movement of social conservatives who have become all the more emboldened in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade last year.
This is no accident. The attacks on transgender people and L.G.B.T.Q. rights are of a piece with the attack on abortion and reproductive rights. It is a singular assault on the bodily autonomy of all Americans, meant to uphold and reinforce traditional hierarchies of sex and gender.
This is the wall we all have to defend, lest we all become the targets. They will not stop at eliminating trans folks. We have to stop them here and now.