Nobody Could Have Foreseen That Attacks On Trans Kids' Care Would Spread To Attacks On Trans Adults!

Joe Manchin and Republicans seek special right to be bigots.

It has been a long fight, and it’s not getting easier. Photo from 2013 protest by Ted Eytan. Used under CC-ASA 2.0.

Trans health care is under an unusually rapid attack from the Right. While the Left still attempts to grapple with the rise of laws against youth care, conservative states have already largely succeeded in their legislative initiatives in that area and are turning to limits on adult care to keep up the political and fundraising momentum gained by attacks on youth in 2020 and 2022.

When COVID hit in 2020, millions of people were suddenly concerned with details of health insurance previously considered obscure. Would Blue Cross cover rectal UV light therapy? Was bleach covered as an outpatient injection, or only when given as an inpatient IV drip? Questions entirely unformulated just weeks before abruptly seemed important. For conservatives this also included the question, “Should trans medical care be covered under the same rules as care for other human beings?”

The Cass Report in the UK was first conceived in 2020, and policies blocking medical treatments for trans youth were formulated in the United States at about the same time. But in that year, not a single state blocked or banned this powerfully positive care. This month NPR reported that one half of all states now had statutes outlawing trans medical care for under-18s in whole or in part.

The political problem for Republicans is that only two states — Kansas and New Hampshire — remain on the risk map for anti-trans legislation maintained by Erin in the Morning, but have not already passed anti-youth care legislation according to NPR. For the GOP to campaign on trans care as a live issue, conservative state legislators and federal legislators from conservative states must propose legislation to “solve” issues not already addressed.

And to cut that Gordian knot, Republicans are swinging dangerously and wildly in the direction of adult care. The UK Independent reports that riders attached to must-pass federal budgetary legislation

would drastically curtail trans people’s access to medical care that advocates routinely describe as critical to their flourishing – much as the 1977 Hyde Amendment restricted abortion access in the wake of Roe v Wade.

Some of these riders have less impact that one might at first assume. Because of existing limits, a rider purporting to curtail active duty and veterans’ insurance benefits related to trans surgical care (a rider widely reported as potentially disastrous in pro-trans media), would have limited immediate impact. Wonkette does not report this as a good thing, of course. The riders, if incorporated into final legislation, would cause immediate harm to a small number of people, and also make it much, much harder to undo existing policies responsible for the previously existing limits on benefits. In the short term, however, the impact would be less strongly felt than other Republican efforts.

Well, Republican and Joe Manchin efforts, Wonkette should say. The former (and soon-to-be-again? Even Wonkette is not sure) Democrat was asked about his vote for the rider affecting surgical benefits for active-duty service members and their families only to first fail to remember the vote, then later follow up with a defense of a much broader anti-care policy affecting not just surgical benefits. From The Independent:

when asked about the amendments, Manchin said he did not know he did [vote for them].

“I better check on that, huh? Maybe I made a mistake,” he told The Independent.

The Independent reached out to Manchin’s office for clarification.

“Senator Manchin believes that Americans who want to serve our country and can meet the standards should have the chance to do so,” a spokesperson said in a statement to The Independent. “However, taxpayer dollars should not be used to pay for any services or treatments that are associated with gender transition.” [Emphasis Wonkette’s.]

Matt Rosendale, the Montana Republican who was running for Senate but then mysteriously decided to resign from the US House after this term instead, issued a vaguely ominous statement on the topic of trans care:

"Certainly, I’d be hopeful that they would go through [if Trump wins] – that we would stop taxpayers’ dollars being used for things that taxpayers in Montana don’t support.”

Oddly, neither Rosendale nor the taxpayers in Montana seem to much care about the federal government paying for energy projects that taxpayers in California and New York do not support.

When Republican Andy Harris of Maryland’s First Congressional District, an author of some of these legislative efforts, was asked why he made such efforts a priority, he trotted out the old chestnut:

"Because there should be no special rights.”

Of course, this is health care. Providing prosthetics isn’t special rights for amputees, nor chemo special rights for cancer patients. Each person has a general right to care for whichever conditions are affecting that specific person’s health.

The lie is put to the “special rights” argument when individual therapies are investigated: In every case the therapies banned (or proposed to be banned) for trans persons are covered for others. Puberty blockers, relentlessly described as experimental and dangerous, are used routinely for a few different conditions that might affect peri-pubertal children, including early puberty which is not typically harmful in itself, but can create problems of social and mental health when a child develops breasts or facial hair at an exceptionally early age. Normal, healthy changes are delayed until a later period when the child is better prepared for them — but only if that child is cis. Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) is covered for perimenopausal and post menopausal cis women for its benefits in mental, dermatological, and sexual health.

From elementary school to old age, many cis people depend on the exact same care that Republicans have denied to trans youth and have now stated in their 2024 platform that they intend to deny to trans adults. Even genital reconstructive surgeries are used for accident victims, cancer patients, and intersex persons, rare though those conditions might be.

“Special rights,” as a rhetorical phrase, dates back decades, and was first used by white people opposing racial equality. Its history is disgusting, and yet as Republicans this month transition from attacks on youth care to attacks on all trans health care, it was inevitable that bigots would turn to this timeworn justification for their bigotry.

It’s up to us to recognize precisely how false it is to portray individual health benefits as “special rights” as soon as an individual’s diagnosis places them outside the majority’s experience. The strategies — bans on military or Medicaid or other government funding streams — are already well known from attacks on reproductive rights largely launched by the same people. It’s not at all clear, especially when the best coverage on trans health is coming from moderate-to-small sized blogs like Erin in the Morning or overseas outlets like The Independent, that the Left is ready for this fight.

Earlier today:

Joe Manchin Is Not, Repeat NOT, Running For The Democratic Nomination. Maybe, Allegedly.

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