Trojan Horse
New proposals in Ohio are the latest to target adult transgender care under the guise of protecting children.
When Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed an executive order banning gender-affirming surgery for minors on Friday, he was scoring easy points from his Republican voting base. The surgeries—highly uncommon and not even available at Ohio hospitals—have become red meat for right, which falsely describes them as being foisted upon children.
But while no Ohio hospitals currently perform gender-affirming surgery for minors, according to the Ohio Capital Journal, DeWine’s move would imperil much more common gender-affirming care for adults in the state. It’s the latest crackdown on transgender adults’ medical freedoms, under the guise of protecting minors.
DeWine’s executive order took the tone of a compromise. In late December, he vetoed a state bill that would have banned youth access to treatments like hormone blockers, as well as prohibited transgender youth from playing on sports teams that correspond with their genders. But with Republican lawmakers threatening to override DeWine’s veto, the governor beat some of his intra-party critics to the punch. In signing his executive order, DeWine also proposed new Health Department rules for transgender patients of all ages.
A draft of those rules bars healthcare facilities from providing gender-affirming care (including hormone treatment) unless a patient is being treated by an endocrinologist, a psychiatrist, and potentially other specialists, under a “multi-disciplinary care plan” reviewed by a medical ethicist.
It’s a far cry from receiving medication from one’s personal doctor. By forcing providers of gender-affirming care to work with teams of specialists, Ohio’s proposed rules would make transgender healthcare rarer to find and harder to afford.
As journalist Erin Reed writes:
“The regulations would essentially end most adult trans care in the state, instituting a defacto ban for many trans patients. Individual private practice doctors, fertility clinics, community health clinics, and potentially even Planned Parenthood would likely not be able to offer care. The results would be devastating in underserved communities. Meanwhile, the few places that could comply with the regulations will likely see a ballooning of demand, leading to extensive waitlists.”
Ohio would not be the first state to restrict transgender adult life on the basis of overheated claims about children. Last year, Florida passed a law banning gender-affirming care for minors. But while Republicans in the state focused on the new restrictions for children, the law also contained provisions similar to Ohio’s new all-age proposals. The law required new levels of medical oversight for transgender care, and required transgender adults to receive treatments from doctors in-person, effectively canceling care for patients who previously saw nurse practitioners or used telemedicine services, the Associated Press reported. When a judge temporarily blocked the law’s restrictions against gender-affirming care for minors last summer, the restrictions for adults were allowed to stand.
Gender-affirming surgery is very uncommon in minors. (Almost all cases are breast and chest surgeries, an August study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found.) But for opponents of LGBTQ+ rights, fear-mongering about children has always been a vehicle for attacks on adults.
Nearly 50 years before Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the state’s transgender care restrictions into law, Florida was the home of one of the country’s first organized anti-LGBTQ+ backlashes. After Florida’s Dade County passed an ordinance in 1977 prohibiting discrimination against people on the basis of sexual orientation, members of the religious right rallied around a model of conservative Christian motherhood. Singer Anita Bryant, a mother of four, formed the “Save Our Children” coalition, which aimed at halting the advance of gay rights by vilifying the LGBTQ+ community as lecherous, predatory, and hellbent on “recruiting” children to queer life.
“Homosexuals cannot reproduce, so they must recruit. And to freshen their ranks, they must recruit the youth of America,” Save Our Children argued.
The line reads like a precursor to current panics about youth “indoctrination” through gay-friendly library books and the presence of queer teachers. It suggests that queer existence is not natural but a perversion to which one must be converted. Under this same false logic, several states have recently passed sweeping anti-drag laws, claiming that drag performers (though some of the laws are vague enough to threaten transgender people, writ-large) are part of a campaign to “groom” children into being gay or transgender.
A judge who temporarily blocked one such law in Montana this summer, wrote that the legislation “will disproportionately harm not only drag performers, but any person who falls outside traditional gender and identity norms.” The law was titled “An Act Prohibiting Minors From Attending Sexually Oriented Shows.”
Americans’ views on transgender rights and transgender care are far from neatly progressive. Still, a safe majority support laws protecting transgender people from discrimination, and oppose laws criminalizing transgender care for minors, a 2022 Pew survey found. The American electorate is more tolerant than the median Republican lawmaker. Many of us know a transgender person, and understand the cruelty of denied care or forced detransition. Laws against adult care would be widely recognized as inhumane.
So the right smuggles it into legislation dressed in save-the-children rhetoric, years of Fox News scare segments priming voters to restrict the medical rights of minors whom they do not know.
There’s an irony in many anti-transgender politicians aligning themselves with the self-described “parents’ rights movement.” That movement portrays itself as a shield against supposed plots to indoctrinate children and educate them against their parents’ wishes. But for all the paranoia about Deep State schemes and Big Government repression by the left, the clearest crackdowns on medical and personal freedoms are Republican-authored laws that use children as a stalking horse for all-age LGBTQ+ bans. Only in support of our most legally voiceless population can we protect the rights we expect for ourselves.
Happy Sunday, momrades. It’s the first real snowy day of the season here, and I spent the morning making a snowman “with” the kids. (They provided art direction.) Snowsuits are hanging up to dry before we head out again with the sled. While I thaw, here’s are some weekend MomLinks:
-In the Atlantic, Stephanie H. Murray unpacks the unique precarity of American parenthood, despite the U.S.’s relative wealth. Without a robust social safety net, American families have further to fall than their peers abroad when a parent loses work, Murray writes:
“To lose work in America is to lose not only your income and the child care it pays for but also practically everything else: your health insurance, your company’s retirement-savings plan, and, potentially, Social Security benefits. Even much of the social safety net—the earned-income tax credit, the refundable portion of the child tax credit, and often Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, what we usually think of as “welfare”—is tied to work. What help is left for those with little or no income is sparse, patchy, and difficult to access (and retain). If American families can’t find a way to juggle work and parenting in spite of all the obstacles, they have a lot to lose and very far to fall.”
-The Supreme Court is allowing Idaho to prohibit women from seeking abortions even during medical emergencies, overturning a lower court’s rulings. The ruling comes days after the hard-right Fifth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that hospitals do not have an obligation to provide life-saving abortions.
-A new Massachusetts millionaires tax is already generating serious revenue for public programs like school lunches. The tax, which takes an additional four percent cut of annual incomes over $1 million, is projected to add $1.5 billion to public funds—more than initially expected, Common Dreams reports. In addition to free lunches for school children, the funds will go toward free tuition for community college students.
-A Maryland law requires that minors be allowed to call a lawyer before undergoing police interrogations. But police are pushing back against the law, arguing that it makes interrogations more difficult, the Baltimore Banner reports. Children’s welfare advocates say cops need to grow up. “I think the reason there’s so much opposition is because it’s easier to get kids to talk,” one advocate told the Banner.
-There’s much to be written about this medically illiterate Elon Musk tweet and the selective medical illiteracy of the “pro-natalist” right, but I’ll save that for a week when I have a stronger stomach:
That’s it for the weekend MomLeft! If you liked this installment, smash that subscribe button or fwd-fwd this newsletter like it’s an old chain email.