Jesus Christ, Just Leave Trans People Alone!
Americans getting damn sick of all of it.
Despite the abundant evidence that most voters simply don’t buy rightwing culture war panic over transgender people, and that, as with abortion, most of us consider healthcare for trans people a matter that’s best handled by people and their doctors (or in the case of minors, the trans kids, their parents, and their doctors), Republicans just cannot seem to resist the urge to use the power of government to interfere in trans people’s lives.
Our case studies today come from (1) West Virginia, which already banned gender-affirming healthcare for people under 18 last year but now wants to extend that ban to adults under 21, and worse, would mandate that mental healthcare practitioners try to “cure” being trans. Yes really. And (B), from Ohio, where in December Gov. Mike DeWine snookered people — including Yr Wonkette! — into thinking he was a reasonable guy by vetoing a bill banning gender-affirming care for minors. But it was a bait and switch: DeWine then issued an executive order requiring a bunch of new stringent requirements for providers of trans healthcare — for minors and adults — that will have the effect of making gender-affirming care so difficult to access that it might as well be banned.
OK, there’s the ugly new developments with links, go read them, be angry, and take action to stop this shit. I guess I’m done here. What’s that, you expected some details? Fine then. Don’t blame me if you barf.
Almost Heavin’, West Virginia
From the indispensable Erin Reed, we have a report on a couple of bills in the West Virginia Legislature that should be found unconstitutional, if they ever make it into law. Sadly, just being blatantly, obviously unconstitutional doesn’t necessarily slow Republicans down at all, not with the current crowd of capricious judicial terrorists sitting on the US Supreme Court.
The first, Senate Bill 194, would extend the state’s existing ban on gender-affirming care for minors under 18 to adults aged 21 and under, because anti-trans ghouls apparently decided they may as well stretch the boundaries of who’s “adult” enough to manage their own healthcare. (The far Right has really glommed on to research on adolescent brain development, which has been the basis for juvenile criminal justice reform. Looking for an excuse to twist the science, wingnuts proclaim that “obviously” trans people have to be prevented from making their own choices until their mid-20s.)
Oh, but it’s much worse than that, as Reed explains:
The bill is broken into sections to target different aspects of transgender care. One section defines being transgender as “sexual deviation” and places it alongside “pedophilia, exhibitionism, masochism, sadomasochism, fetishism,” and more. Another defines minors for the purposes of this bill as being anyone under 21 years of age, expanding the definition to include transgender adults. The bill then would ban gender affirming care for anyone under this age while also banning the usage of state funds for gender affirming care.
That’s where we get to the part that simply has to be unconstitutional (on Normal Earth at least): Having redefined being transgender as a “deviation,” the bill mandates that all mental healthcare workers — counselors, social workers, psychologists, and even psychiatrists — provide care aimed at “curing” people of being transgender; i.e., “conversion therapy.” It’s a very explicit ban on mental health providers even affirming that transgender identity is normal and healthy. By definition, being trans would become a “delusion or disorder” that must be “cured”:
“Any mental health care professional, counselor, or interstate teletherapy service shall be prohibited from attempting to induce or exacerbate gender dysphoria in a minor by continuing or worsening such condition, delusion, or disorder with no intent of cure or cure-pursuing recovery.”
The bill would punish violations with revocation of licensure and up to a $5,000 fine and being banned from working in educational settings. For good measure, it would even strip the professional of their retirement benefits.
Never mind that it doesn’t work, that virtually all major mental healthcare professional organizations have condemned it as torture, and that “conversion therapy” is banned in 27 other states. Notes Reed:
There is no evidence that there is any “cure” for being transgender. Meanwhile, there is ample evidence that conversion therapy harms transgender people. Transgender people forced into conversion therapy are more than twice as likely to attempt suicide, and the risk does not differ between “secular” and “religious” conversion therapy attempts.
Again, we can’t see how that isn’t an unconstitutional restriction on providers’ basic First Amendment rights, by forcing them to provide “care” that is in direct violation of their professional standards. Let’s hope this bill is defeated, the quicker the better.
The other stupid evil West Virginia bill, SB 195, would essentially make it illegal to be a trans person in public. Again, as Reed explains, it
would target transgender people as being “obscene” and would bar “transgender exposure, performances, or display” to any minor. This could have the effect of barring transgender people from being able to exist in public, as it would be difficult to avoid being seen as a transgender person by a minor.
That too sounds like a blatant First Amendment violation, shattering the ban on “prior restraint” of free expression, but once again, under the SCOTUS of Nuts, not even Bobby McGee can say what freedom is anymore. Again, this thing needs to be stopped before it can even get passed, so organize, organize, organize!
Ohio: Spill DeWine, Gonna Hurl
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine fooled a lot of us into thinking he was a comparatively decent guy last month when he vetoed the state Legislature’s bill banning gender-affirming care for minors. We noted at the time that the Lege had the votes to override the bill — which it did this week — but oh mercy, as The New Republic reports, DeWine actually issued an executive order with new provisions that are far worse than the original bill.
Despite DeWine’s comforting veto spiel about how parents of trans kids told him that their children would likely have died without access to gender-affirming care, the same press release noted that he’d be directing state agencies to adopt “administrative rules” to ban gender-reassignment surgery for minors under 18, but much, much more, presented in a bland assurance that new rules were needed to gather data and ensure that all trans people get good healthcare.
In reality, it’s a load of new regulations that’ll make gender-affirming care far more difficult for both minors and adults. As the article explains, the new mandates require that
providers submit detailed data on care provision to the state every six months and new requirements that anyone seeking care get the approval of a team including a psychiatrist, an endocrinologist, and a bioethicist. While getting credit for vetoing one ban, DeWine is proposing another ban in all but name.
The thing is, most providers don’t have all those people on their staff, or don’t have the ability to do the insane amount of paperwork and reporting to state agencies necessary. The practical result is that adults who are already getting treatment will now need to seek consultations with a full suite of professionals just to refill prescriptions they already have. Only a few major hospitals have such teams.
As reporter Melissa Gira Grant notes, DeWine is simply taking a page from the rightwing effort to stop abortion care before Roe v. Wade was overturned: Pile on endless regulations in the name of “safety,” making care extremely more expensive and difficult to access.
Such regulations have little (if not nothing) to do with health, safety, and medical ethics and everything to do with creating unnecessary risks for those providing health care. They also give those who oppose this care a way of couching their opposition in other terms: Rather than a “ban,” they say they support gender-affirming care with more data collection and oversight; care that is more “comprehensive.”
The extensive reporting requirements and full healthcare team requirements are pretty much the nine-foot-wide hallways of anti-abortion TRAP laws, applied to transgender healthcare. And because it’s not technically a “ban,” that may also make court challenges to the rules all the more difficult, too.
It’s sickening, and it’s going to have pretty much the same effects DeWine claimed he wanted to avoid when he vetoed the ban bill.
Again: Americans are getting fed up with Republicans pushing this crap, and the electoral consequences need to come sooner instead of later. Also, maybe I should have just stopped writing when I said “there are the links, go read them, be angry, and take action to stop this shit.”
[Erin in the Morning / SB 194 West Virginia / New Republic]
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Eve was trans and you cannot convince me otherwise. She was born from a man’s rib which means she started out with male DNA.
I can’t wait to say this to an evangelical.
If you want to ban something for being a deviation, ban modern conservative thinking, as it is a form of sociopathy.