If You Read the G.O.P.’s Anti-Trans Policies You’ll See What It Really Wants

Speaker 1
And it's attempting to really nail them down as transgender and build out a case that if we can prove that you've accessed gender affirming care, we're going to remove you from your parents' custody. The other thing this does is anyone who's ever worked in a field with kids, right? If you've ever been a teacher or an educator, a child care provider, you know that you've probably signed some paperwork making you a mandatory reporter, meaning that if you have reason to suspect that a young person is being abused as the law defines it, then you must turn them in. And because of this directive from the governor and the attorney general attempting to say, you know, we are interpreting the state's childhood to be statute to include this care, that means that nurses, counselors, guidance counselors in schools, teachers, assistant teachers, child care providers, this entire network of folks who work with youth across the state of Texas are then drafted into Governor Abbott's war on transgender youth.

Speaker 2
Well, the term gender affirming care is going to be not just a big part of this conversation, but it's obviously central to a lot of the debate in Texas elsewhere. What is gender affirming care? And which parts of that care package or structure did Abbott try to get classified as child abuse? Sure.

Speaker 1
So gender dysphoria carries with it a number of other symptoms and especially when untreated and that can range from depression and anxiety to low self-esteem down to poor academic performance, struggling to build healthier relationships with friends or their family, all the way up to suicidality. And according to a vast array of research, transgender youth have a significantly higher suicideality than their peers.

Speaker 2
And just to put some numbers on that. We saw one study where 56% of transgender youth reported previous suicidal ideation that was compared to 20% of cisgender youth, 31% of transgender youth reported a previous suicide attempt versus 11% of cisgender youth. But how does access to care change that?

Speaker 1
Foundational. So when I sat in a courtroom in Arkansas where we were challenging that state span on gender affirming care, there was a long line of medical experts and doctors who worked with transgender youth who took the witness stand and spoke to the efficacy and impact that this care has on young people's lives. It's very abstract. I think it can be very hard for a lot of cisgender people to understand what does for you is and how much it can impact your life and sort of stunt your emotional development and your emotional growth. And one of the biggest themes that I heard in that testimony was one, not just that it sort of relieved dysphoria, but you also suddenly see that when young trans people do have this degree of bodily autonomy, they begin to improve in many other ways.

Speaker 2
I want to hold on this for a minute because I think there can be, including I would say for me, a bit of an empathic chasm to clear when it comes to gender dysphoria. If you don't have it, it's what it means to have it and to feel it is very hard to put yourself in. And my friend Emily St. James, who I worked with back in box, she wrote a great piece and she wrote in it something that I always find helpful to think about here. She wrote, if you are a cis person, imagine for a moment that all evidence to the contrary, everyone in the world becomes convinced your gender is not what it is. If you're a man, everyone starts using she-heart pronouns for you and calling you by a woman's name. And one day you start insisting to the world you are who you are and the world insists otherwise. And that sense of, from my trans friends, that sense of unbelievable wrongness between how you are seeing and how you feel, that I don't exactly have a question here, but I just think it's worth stopping for a minute that the intensity of it

Speaker 1
So one thing that I think is important to understand is that these bills aren't really responding to any sort of like grassroots demand for these bills. They are coming at the behest of a group of organizations within the right wing that have at the core of their worldview this very binary and rigid understanding of gender. And one of them is the American Principles Project. And over the course of the last few years has tried to warm politicians on the right up to the idea of going after transgender people. And there was a report that Magyaster in the New York Times did, which is called Terry Schilling, this group's president. And he said, we do in fact want to ban this care for anyone of any age. And in his words, the purpose in going towards young people was, quote, going where the consensus is. Now, one, I would challenge the idea that there is a consensus. And two, I think that belies just a sort of bad faith a lot of these discussions are that most of these groups, Alec, these organizations that are really well known in right wing circles for basically acting as bill mills for sort of printing off this legislation and distributing them across states, they are not going to tolerate medical transition at all.

Speaker 2
So tell me about how intersex people play into this. Can you say what intersex means and where these conservative groups and some of these bills tend to stand on healthcare for that population?

Speaker 1
It's interesting that you tease out sort of this existing divide in the right between more economic concerns versus social conservative concerns. One, I think they have more similarities than they differ. Conservative economics tend to produce socially conservative outcomes. Two, there's been an interesting turn in right-wing politics over the course of just about the last decade, where there's been a lot of motivation and energy around the social conservative wing. This sort of winglets devoted towards a explicit construction of what it means to be American along racial, gender, and class lines.