Imagine Sending Your Illegal Aliens To Prison And They Come Home Days Later With An Operation
What the hell happened? Who did this to me? Who did this to me?
For the last five months or so, your friendly neighborhood Crip Dyke has been monitoring several cases moving through the courts in which trans prisoners, convicted of felonies, have sued for access to accommodations, usually health care. So far, however, they’ve not yet been ripe for a good Wonkette article as decisions have frequently been preliminary and procedural or otherwise limited. Imagine our surprise when Donald Trump announced in last night’s presidential debate that Kamala Harris is trans-surgerying immigrant toddlers in custody for murdering and eating puppies in Ohio! (Paraphrase!) Now we are forced — forced, mind you! — to rush before your eyes all things related to debates, trans immigrant felons, and Trump. And, oh, Lordy! is this one a doozy.
IT WAS THIS DEBATE!
For the purpose of randos not sending us stupid letters with some innocent lawyer’s signature attached, your Wonkette will concede arguendo that what actually came out of the meth-addled chinchillas inside Trump’s semi-human skull was something much closer to this:
Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison!
Many people are now asking Wonkette, “Sir! Sir! Just where did that batshit idea come from, if not Trump’s own belfry?” And being servicey as we are, we are here to tell you!
We have no fucking clue.
There is, in fact, a bitter irony here in that the trans community has very mixed perceptions of Harris, with the biggest point of resentment being that as California attorney general, she oversaw and approved funding expenditures for fighting trans prisoners’ health care access in the state. Health care, of course, is notoriously bad for all prisoners, and for reasons one must struggle to understand, George Soros has not yet forced through a special exception for surgical winkie tucks. So trans prisoners —who are legitimately a very vulnerable population — took a large risk to file the suit, and couldn’t have been happy that the so-called reformist prosecutor recently elected AG wasn’t on their side.
The complicated reality is that the lawsuit was already ongoing before she became AG and that she had both a limited role and limited discretion in supporting access to prison health care. We don’t expect that to make trans prisoners feel all sunshine and rainbows for Harris just because of that context, but it is fair to say that boosting access to gender-affirming care in prison is perhaps the least credible accusation of Harris supporting trans people that Trump could have made.
That said, Shannon Minter, transguy lawyer extraordinaire and one whom your friendly, neighbourhood Crip Dyke trusts implicitly, knows Harris from way back and vouches to Slate that she was always more pro-trans than other government lawyers, certainly other prosecutors. In the Year of our Flying Spaghetti two-thousand-fucking-six, Harris convened a conference on ending the gay panic defense and specifically argued that these efforts must address trans panic defenses as well. (Read the entire Slate article for the details, but while imperfect, Harris has always been ahead of the curve on trans issues.)
Given that history, Trump surely could have hammered Harris on wanting people who murder trans folks to go to jail for the same amount of time as people who murder cis folks. His bigoted following would certainly embrace that criticism, but that, unfortunately for Trump, has the fatal drawbacks of being both too long ago for him to remember and factually true.
The source of Trump’s brain eruption must, then, lie elsewhere. And yr Wonkette has a theory as to where.
That Idaho lawsuit mentioned above arises out of a relatively new law that bans treatments that alter the “appearance” of a person “in a way that is inconsistent with the individual’s biological sex.”
Yet it is also the (much skirted) law that while a state has a person in their legal and physical custody, they are required to provide appropriate medical care. This applies to children removed from dangerous parents, people awaiting trial in jail, and, yes, convicted felons in prison. Courtesy of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution it is not possible to eliminate all medical care merely because a person has been convicted of a crime.
The plaintiffs filed using pseudonyms out of fear of retaliation. I know, I know, the idea of guards retaliating against prisoners would be laughable anywhere, and only moreso in Idaho, but the important point here is that because of the anonymity when the suit was filed, we had no idea if any of these people are immigrants, documented or otherwise.
The lawsuit is ongoing, and wasn’t filed in the last few days, assuring that it, like other lawsuits in other locations, wouldn’t have lasted in Trump’s skull long enough to emerge at the debate last night except for the fact that there have been significant developments in the last week. The plaintiffs have reverted to their legal names (it’s not clear why, but possibly because their identities couldn’t be kept secret as a practical matter when seeking care) and one of those plaintiffs has the last name Heredia, which might sound a bit immigranty. The other major development is that the suit was certified as a class action, which means that all prisoners in state custody in Idaho are entitled to minimal gender-affirming medical care until the case is decided on the merits, even — and I can’t stress this enough — even if they are an illegal immigrant anchor baby in prison for eating your poor, white grandmother’s only cat.
It is, then, at least conceivable that some undocumented immigrant now in prison may receive gender-related health care. We scoff at the idea that this will result in many surgeries as by the year 2017 the entire nation had provided a total of two prisoners with gender-related surgical care, but sure. Could happen.
However, given that this case is before a federal judge nominated by and confirmed under Trump, yr Wonkette has no clue why any of this should be laid at the feet of the Biden administration generally, much less Harris specifically. Still, it’s at least a recent nugget of trans news that might have agitated those previously mentioned meth-addled mustelids sentenced to serve as Trump’s brain.
And that is your story about how Trump might have ended up fixating on transified illegal prison immigrant asylum babies!
On the other hand, the New York Times says it’s this:
Please don’t ask us why he was referencing “trans national criminals.” We have had enough peeks into Trump’s brain for today and would like some time to recover.
Your friendly neighborhood Crip Dyke also writes other perverted stuff!
For the record, just because the Trump campaign now says to the NYTimes that his statement totally makes sense as a criticism of something Harris did in 2019, that doesn't mean that he actually had that in mind.
I mean, even if some portion of his brain was thinking about the ACLU questionnaire with no accompanying policy efforts as a Senator, her intervening resignation from the senate, and her 3.5 years as VP not following up on that questionnaire at all, the language Trump chose was, "Now she wants..." as if this were some recent action.
None of this is to say that my theory of how this spilled out of his brain is more correct than the theory that he's referencing a specific ACLU questionnaire that he very definitely remembers along with his man and his TV and his camera.
But I honestly think that Trump freaking out in reaction to something in the news this week and blaming it on his political opponent is at least somewhat more plausible than the idea that Trump's memory has room for 5 year old questionnaires he never read.
"They're giving health care to prisoners!"
"Okay."
"Aren't you outraged?"
"Not really."
"Well, you should be! They're getting something we're not. We have to work for it!"
"So... you want the government to give you free health care too?"
"No! That's socialism!"