This article explores the escalating attacks on the transgender community, particularly under the Trump administration. It highlights how these attacks, often disguised as concerns for medical welfare, are thinly veiled expressions of prejudice and power dynamics. The author argues that targeting a vulnerable group with little political power is the hallmark of a bully, and that the shrinking list of acceptable targets for right-wing exploitation has led them to focus on the transgender community.
It was easy to think that the diatribe about school transgender policies Donald Trump voiced during his presidential campaign was his most 'deranged and despicable,' as I described it at the time. At an event with Moms for Liberty, the far-right gang of book-banners, Trump said the following: 'Think of it. Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s gonna happen with your child.
And you know, many of these childs 15 years later say, ‘What the hell happened? Who did this to me?’ They say, ‘Who did this to me?’” None of this existed in the real world; one would have to be bereft of cognitive capacity to believe Trump's picture of children being kidnapped, held for days so they can be operated on by their school, then to wake up 15 years later to discover their sex had been changed. As we now know, however, Trump was only getting started. With the issuance of executive orders starting on his first day in office, Trump wiped out policies aimed at protecting transgender adults from discrimination, and moved to outlaw gender-affirming medical therapies for anyone under 19 — which includes 18-year-olds who are legally adults — by cutting off federal funding for healthcare institutions that provide such care. Trump is no longer claiming that K-12 schools were subjecting children to involuntary operations, but once you've said that you've said everything. He banned transgender individuals from serving in the military and ordered the Federal Bureau of Prisons to move transgender inmates into the general populations consistent with their birth genders, which exposes them to physical assault. (Federal Judge Royce Lamberth of Washington, D.C., on Wednesday blocked the government from transferring three transgender women into the male prison population or terminating their hormone treatments.) He declared that the federal government recognizes only 'two sexes, male and female,' which are 'not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality,' and has forbidden health plans serving federal employees to cover gender-affirming care for people under 19. This all amounts to what legal commentator Mark Joseph Stern of Slate accurately labels 'the biggest, broadest, most vicious assault on transgender existence we’ve ever seen,' a campaign of 'unfathomable' scope. Trump's attacks on transgender individuals and their care were part of his drive to portray himself as a political strongman. But they're just the opposite: They're expressions of cowardice, because he well knows that his targets have little political power. Who are the targets of these orders? They're not a large group. About 1.6 million U.S. adults, or one-half of 1%, and 300,000 adolescents aged 13 to 17, or 1.4%, identify as transgender, according to a study by UCLA law school. A study by Harvard researchers found that fewer than 1% adolescents with private health insurance received either puberty blockers or hormone treatments. “We are not seeing inappropriate use of this sort of care,” Landon Hughes, the study's lead author, told the Associated Press. “And it’s certainly not happening at the rate at which people often think it is.” Yet transgender care, especially for adolescents, has become an ideological litmus test for conservatives and Republican politicians. Restrictions on gender-affirming therapies for those under 18 have been enacted in 26 states; the rules imposed by Tennessee are under consideration by the U.S. Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments in the case Dec. 4. These laws purport to be based on sound medical concerns. But that's a smoke screen, since leading medical associations and physicians involved with pediatric and adolescent care support the therapies outlawed by the states as the legitimate standard of care for their patients. One can always identify bullies by the targets they choose, and that's the case here. As I wrote during Trump's first term, when his anti-transgender policies were still in the gestational state, 'There is no conceivable reason to support discrimination against transgender individuals other than to show one can target any community, as long as it doesn’t have a strong political voice or political power. These are the actions of bullies and cowards, pretending to be strong.' Over recent years and decades, the roster of targets the right wing could exploit to keep its base unified has been shrinking. Open racism became no longer socially acceptable (though it made a strong comeback in the first Trump era). The list of ethnic groups that could be stereotyped as undesirables had shrunk. It was no longer respectable to laugh at or denigrate the mentally ill, the homeless, the disabled. Gays and lesbians had moved into the mainstream of culture and society. Even conservative and Republican families had come to accept gay and lesbian siblings, children and parents as deserving of their love and respect. The transgender community, however, remained vulnerable, an easy target for politicians and demagogues who sought to exploit prejudice and fear for their own gain
LGBTQ Rights Transgender Discrimination Donald Trump Healthcare Politics Social Issues
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