For many years now, conservatives, along with an influential group of centrists and liberals, have presented a certain narrative regarding trans people in this country: They are Concerned. They’re worried, they say, about trans women in bathrooms—what if a male predator leverages trans rights systems to pretend to be a woman and ambushes victims in the bathroom? They’re worried, they say, about people getting transition care too easily—what if gender clinics and endocrinologists start bum-rushing children into transition surgery? Above all, they say, they are outraged about trans women in sports—what if a man pretends to be a woman so he can win first place easily?
This narrative is and always has been a lie. What these people actually have is a seething, obsessive hatred of trans people. They want them either back in the closet or dead.
We know that because rather than address any of the alleged “concerns” mentioned above, they are moving straight to a total prohibition of any trans care for children. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) drew up a bill making pediatric transition care of any kind a federal felony to provide, punishable by up to a decade in prison, and it passed Wednesday night. Notably, it would not have passed without three turncoat House Democrats: Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez of Texas, and Donald Davis of North Carolina.
The bill is expected to fall short of the 60 votes it needs to pass in the Senate, but the Trump administration is doing its usual end run around Congress to achieve the same result. Secretary of Health and Human Services RFK Jr., along with Dr. Oz, the head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, have announced new upcoming rules stipulating that any hospital that conducts pediatric transition care will lose its Medicaid and Medicare funding. Since virtually every hospital takes such money, it means a de facto total ban at all hospitals across the country. Once that is accomplished, a total ban on trans care for anyone is highly likely to be the next goal.
Should this policy be adopted and pass muster with the courts, the effect will be devastating. Most immediately, trans children—and trans people in general—are at a seriously elevated risk of suicide because of discrimination; transition care is shown to greatly reduce that risk. More generally, hundreds of thousands of trans children will have their civil rights gravely infringed; hundreds of thousands of parents will have their own parental rights abridged. We’ve found those meddling Big Government bureaucrats telling you how to raise your kids: the Republican Party.
It’s not like the true motivation here was ever a great mystery, as trans activists and anyone halfway paying attention could attest. For instance, all the above-mentioned “concerns” are either provably exaggerated or straight up make no sense. Trans rights don’t have anything to do with the possibility of men invading women’s bathrooms. A man could already do that by dressing up regardless of what rights trans people have, and in any case, toilets are a pretty unusual and risky location to try to harass or assault someone. Studies show allowing trans people to use the correct bathroom doesn’t have any effect on safety.
Inflammatory narratives about gender clinics have repeatedly turned out to be complete fabrications, and often come from dedicated transphobes lying about what they’ve seen. As a rule, health care is expensive and difficult to access in this country, and trans care is, if anything, costlier and less acceptable still.
On the sports question, if an adult man were to claim to be a woman solely so he could compete in a women’s competition, that at least would theoretically be unfair. The problem is that this does not happen. Sports leagues that still allow trans competitors require some proof of having undergone hormone therapy, and studies demonstrate this largely erodes any physical advantage from undergoing male puberty.
In any case, the numbers involved here are microscopic. Precisely one (1) trans person has ever competed in the Olympics, and they did not win a medal. As of a year ago, there were fewer than ten trans athletes in all of American college sports, and their record isn’t that great either. Notable transphobe Riley Gaines somehow parlayed a career out of tying a trans woman for fifth place in a college swim meet.
Elsewhere, the Greene/Trump assault on trans rights is exactly what the founders of the transphobic movement have been advocating for decades now. In The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male, the notorious transphobe Janice Raymond argued that “the problem of transsexualism would best be served by morally mandating it out of existence,” though even she argued for tight regulations on access to transition care rather than prohibiting it outright.
All this is important not just for trans people or parents of trans children. A constitutive element of MAGA fascism is cruelty for its own sake; Republicans are coming after trans people because they are a small and largely powerless minority, and any “moderate” who collaborates in efforts to grant them equal rights is a fool, a bigot, a liar, or all three. Republicans are also coming after them because they believe they can win votes by running transphobic electoral campaigns, though the recent gubernatorial election in Virginia, where 57 percent of the Republican’s ads accused Democrat Abigail Spanberger of being soft on the “trans agenda,” showed that transphobic campaigns may be played out at least with a purple-state electorate. But should MAGA nonetheless succeed in stomping down the least of these our fellow citizens, Republicans won’t stop there. Sooner or later, you and anyone reading this will be on the target list.