I have several friends who are parents of trans kids. It’s rarely an easy road. Establishing gender dysphoria – the medical condition in which one’s deeply felt sense of gender is different from one’s assigned sex – is often a complicated process. Before it’s identified, many of my friends’ kids have struggled, and been diagnosed with a variety of other disorders before doctors and psychiatrists hone in on gender. Sometimes, kids speak up for themselves. Sometimes they’re listened to, sometimes not.
So to finally get that gender dysphoria diagnosis, for my friends anyway, has been an occasion for joy and relief. And when the interventions – hormones, hormone blockers, even (infrequently) surgical procedures – work, it’s almost like a miracle. No wonder studies show that receiving gender-affirming care reduces suicide and depression among teenagers. Trans kids are trans kids (and non-binary kids are non-binary kids, and so on), and, thank God, we now have ways to help them live as they are.
I wonder if any Republican legislators in Idaho, Florida, Texas, Arkansas, Alabama, and other states currently banning transgender healthcare have ever met anyone trans, or anyone whose kid is trans. I understand that the latest raft of horrifying anti-transgender laws and anti-gay laws are mostly meant as catnip for the self-styled religious conservatives who make up the Republican party’s largest base. I understand that they’re part of a national campaign, not some grassroots movement. And I understand that it’s an election year.
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But if you know anyone transgender, these laws are just unspeakably cruel, even if the hate is just for show.
Take Idaho’s hideous new monstrosity, House Bill 675, which recently passed the Idaho State House and is likely to be signed into law.
In a repellant move that hasn’t been reported on much, the bill actually shoehorns its anti-trans provisions into an existing law banning female fenital mutilation, or FGM. FGM is a horrific, usually non-consensual procedure that permanently disfigures young women’s genitalia and, by design, renders many incapable of experiencing sexual pleasure. It often involves a total clitorectomy, has absolutely no medical benefit, and is basically female castration.
It is this prohibition that the wise men of Idaho (mostly men, anyway) have “amended” to ban not only gender confirmation surgery (including mastectomy) for those under age 18 but hormones and hormone blockers as well. Needless to say, these interventions are carefully supervised medical procedures, fully authorized by every relevant medical and psychological association, and based on decades of scientific data. (Unlike FGM, their effects are often reversible, especially in the case of hormonal therapies.) They have as much to do with FGM as peeling an apple does with stabbing someone to death.
Like Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s executive order which seeks to classify transgender healthcare as a form of “child abuse,” HB 675 makes it a felony for a doctor to perform any of these procedures, under penalty of life in prison. (It’s been incorrectly reported that HB 675 also makes it a felony to take a child out of state in order to obtain hormones or surgery. Actually, that provision is a holdover from the ban on FGM, and according to the text of the bill would not apply to transgender healthcare.)
The trouble with these laws is that, by pandering to a know-nothing base enraged by One America News, they have left scientific and judicial reality completely behind.
First, transgender is a thing. I can’t believe I really have to say that in 2022, but if you’re too lazy to watch trans people tell their stories on Netflix, take it from me, your friendly white cisgender gay rabbi. Or if not me, the American Psychological Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Psychiatric Association. You know, the people who do peer-reviewed studies to see if something’s true or not.
Gender is between your ears; it’s how you conceive yourself to be. Sex is between your legs. (And other places, but you get the idea.)
Ironically, the Idaho bill is so dumb that, technically, it applies to no one. It applies, it says, to acts undertaken “for the purpose of attempting to change or affirm the child’s perception of the child’s sex.” Well, guess what, Idaho Republicans, gender confirmation surgery isn’t about perception of sex. It’s about gender. So your stupid bill applies to no one.
I doubt that rationale will fly in court, but it’s a nice example of why being completely ignorant is a poor legislative strategy.
Second, criminalizing a widely-accepted form of medical treatment, chosen by informed parents in consultation with doctors, interferes with that institution that conservatives are supposed to care about: the family. As Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson (no bleeding heart liberal) said when he vetoed that state’s first attempt to ban gender-affirming healthcare, such bans “create new standards of legislative interference with physicians and parents as they deal with some of the most complex and sensitive matters concerning our youths… This would be—and is—a vast government overreach.”
That is exactly right – and terribly ironic. Bills like HB 765 are radically anti-family. The state is telling parents how to raise their kids, and threatening to throw doctors in jail for helping them exercise those familial rights.
Finally, transgender is also “a thing” legally, especially since June, 2020, when the conservative-majority Supreme Court held that anti-trans discrimination is a form of sex discrimination, in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. That principle, codified in an opinion written by Justice Gorsuch, is still the law of the land and should apply in these cases even more than in employment contexts. HB 765 singles out for opprobrium a form of widely-endorsed medical care utilized by a particular population. It criminalizes the medical procedures which enable that population to live their lives fully. It strikes at the heart of transgender identity, even as it works so hard to deny it.
The truth is, I don’t care if these laws are just red meat for the Republican base. They are going to harm real people, including people I love. I understand that changes in our society’s conceptions of gender can be challenging for some. But do the damn work! Get to know someone trans, or read a book, or watch a movie. See what trans lives are really like. Then stop trying to destroy them.
