Congress Gets Into Christmas Spirit By Banning Care For Soldiers' Transgender Kids
Oh yeah, and most of the Democrats too.
It’s that time of year, Wonkerinos! Time for gift-giving and caloric binging and drinking yourself into a stupor at holiday parties and watching the Boris Karloff-narrated “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” (still the only acceptable Grinch adaptation) and spending time with family and friends and reveling in the beauty of our collective humanity because there’s more that unites us than divides us, and so on, world without end, amen.
It is also time for Congress’s annual game, “What poison pills can we slip into the annual massive, must-pass National Defense Authorization Act to force lawmakers from the other party to take a tough vote and screw over one of their constituencies?” And this year the honor goes to … the transgender children of military families! Congrats! Or not!
The War on Christmas may be over (apparently we liberals lost to Glorious Commandante Trump), but there is always some other skirmish to be fought in our great culture wars.
Last week the House passed its iteration of the $895 billion NDAA. The bill authorized a roughly 1 percent increase in military spending, in line with the overall spending deal former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy made with the White House in 2023 that Donald Trump is now having a fit over. There was the usual mishmash of provisions that no lawmaker wants to vote against, most notably the 14.5 percent pay increase for junior enlisted service members and a 4.5 percent increase for other service members. If America is going to spend too much on its military, our opinion is that at least we should pay the people in the military a living wage, which we have not always done.
But towards the end of the House negotiations, current Speaker and Trump lickspittle Mike Johnson insisted on throwing in a provision that prohibits the military’s TRICARE health plans from covering gender dysphoria treatment for minors under the age of 18, if such treatment can lead to “sterilization.” Which, to Republicans, is any gender dysphoria treatment whatsoever.
So if you are a military family with a child undergoing care for gender dysphoria, well, you’re shit out of luck in terms of having your otherwise-darn-good military-provided health insurance cover what can be extended and expensive treatment.
There is no reason for this provision other than pure mean-spiritedness. The number of transgender people in America is vanishingly small. The number of transgender children in military families is likely a small subset of that. It’s not as if covering such care is a mortal threat to the financial health of the United States. And being a military brat can be tough enough, with all the moving and going to new schools and having to make new friends every couple of years. (We grew up in a big military town, so we’re very familiar with this dynamic.) Imagine being a teenager dealing with something as challenging as gender dysphoria at the same time as all this and the normal challenges of adolescence? Yeesh.
The provision was enough to compel a fair number of House Democrats to vote against the bill. Adam Smith, the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, was furious that this provision “taints an otherwise excellent piece of legislation.”
But Republicans like the execrable Rep. Chip Roy were of course very happy about it:
Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, called the ban a step in the right direction, saying, “I think these questions need to be pulled out of the debate of defense, so we can get back to the business of defending the United States of America without having to deal with social engineering debates.”
Banning coverage of gender-dysphoria care is in fact injecting this issue into the debate over funding national defense, but Roy is either too disingenuous or too dumb to admit it.
When the Senate version of the NDAA came up for a vote this past Wednesday, Democratic senators also faced the choice of whether to go along with this assault on transgender youth. Which 37 of them did, voting “aye” and allowing the bill to pass by a comfortable margin and head off to President Biden’s desk for his signature.
We don’t know exactly what went on in these Democrats’ heads, but we’re guessing a fear of election-season ads screeching Senator So-and-So was willing to destroy our military over transgender teenagers because he’s a woke communist pervert was in the mix somewhere, along with some skittishness over the latest election results and wanting to get out of town for the holidays. In other words, the usual.
One senator who voted against the NDAA was Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, who had never before voted against the bill. In a floor speech, she noted her office’s estimate that the anti-transgender care provision would affect around 6,000 to 7,000 military families, adding:
“The NDAA has embodied the idea that there is more that brings us together than separates us, that our service members and national defense are not to be politicized. That we put our country over a party when the chips are on the table,” she said. “Unfortunately, this year that was ignored — all to gut the rights of our service members to get the health care they need for their children.”
The reaction by transgender people, advocates, and anyone else with a sense of empathy and humanity has been predictably apoplectic, with promises of primaries, withholding of votes, and accusations that these senators have failed military families.
Yr Wonkette is simply mad about all of it. We are mad that the Republicans, in their neverending persecution of LGBTQ people, would deny necessary and life-saving care to teenagers struggling with gender dysphoria. We are mad that Democrats either could not or would not find a way to strip this provision out of the final bill. We are mad at the vast majority (of Democrats even!) who voted for it. We are mad that we understand the calculation here — healthcare for a few thousand people versus a huge spending bill that touches a vast swath of our economy — that drove them to vote for it. We’re mad that those who are mad at Democrats are yelling at them instead of at the deeply cruel Republicans who managed to force them to make this Sophie’s Choice in the first place.
We’re even preemptively mad at everyone who is going to be mad at us over our position here.
Happy holidays to everyone except our nation’s lawmakers, who continue to suck.
Wonkette is a reader-supported publication that cannot just switch hosting platforms because other people who hate us and everything we stand for use the same damn platform.
For the record, in case people are interested:
>> In a floor speech, [Sen Baldwin] noted her office’s estimate that the anti-transgender care provision would affect around 6,000 to 7,000 military families... <<
based on information publicly available trans communities have been trying to figure out who is and isn't affected and to what degree. Baldwin's numbers here appear to be (again, based on what info we have, which is decidedly imperfect) a close estimate of the number of families with a child who has been diagnosed with gender dysphoria.
Having that diagnosis, however, does not mean being on puberty blockers or hormones. It does not mean that one is attempting to access surgery or even thinking that one will likely attempt to access it as an adult. The majority of people who socially transition go through little or no medical transition care.
The exact percentages of kids with the diagnosis that are also receiving medical transition care of the kind that would be banned under this NDAA rider are unknown and have broad error bars. The few people who are saying all 6k-7k kids are receiving medical care in the form of drugs or surgeries are not credible, but those attempting to back up a guess with evidence are still hitting numbers between 500 and 4,000.
I'm not saying any of this to make the case that it's acceptable to do this to families if it's only targeting and denying care to 500 kids. Even one kid would be too many. But many people are asking for hard numbers and I want everyone reading Wonkette to understand that for very good reasons including medical privacy it's not always possible to get exact numbers. We have estimates. There are large uncertainties. Most of the estimates you'll see reported by major outlets are reporting on all kids with a diagnosis. But because most kids see a therapist around the age of 13 or maybe 14, and since most doctors don't prescribe puberty blockers, and since the vast, vast majority of providers won't start a kid on estrogens, progesterone, spironolactone, or testosterone until at the very least the age of 16, it's exceedingly unlikely that even half of all those diagnosed are taking prescription drugs related to gender affirming care.
You want more info and more certainty than that? Guess what. You can't have it. Even kids get to have some privacy.
Democrats seem to have reacted to their election loss like a soda company (yes, today's analogy) that just had a terrible last quarter competing with Coke--they assume their product must be crap because the voters (consumers) rejected it in favor of the alternative.
The problem is you're not going to beat Coke by making your soda taste more like Coke--consumers will just buy Coke, the real thing!
Alternatively, if the party (company) believes its product is actually good, then the issue is not the product itself but its ability to sell the product to the consumer. Maybe it is worth figuring out how to make our product more popular.