The Texas Supreme Court just ruled that blocking parents from providing gender-affirming care to their children is just fine.
“The Texas Supreme Court upheld a recent state law that prohibits doctors from prescribing gender-affirming care to transgender minors after parents and medical professionals challenged the constitutionality of the restriction,” reports The Texas Tribune.
And what was the reasoning of this 8-1 decision? Well, it’s “complicated,” as the court’s decision reads. The opinion said that “the most appropriate treatment for a child suffering from gender dysphoria” is a “complicated question.”
Me: Who should answer this “complicated question?”
Texas Supreme Court: “Doctors…”
Me: Yes!
Texas Supreme Court: “…and legislators.”
Me: “Ugh! You were SO close!”
“[W]e conclude the Legislature made a permissible, rational policy choice to limit the types of available medical procedures for children, particularly in light of the relative nascency of both gender dysphoria and its various modes of treatment and the Legislature’s express constitutional authority to regulate the practice of medicine,” Justice Rebeca Aizpuru Huddle wrote in the decision.
OK, sure. It’s important for the medical field to be regulated in some way. I’ll give them that (though one could argue that Texas isn’t doing such a great job).
What I take issue with is the use of the term “relative nascency,” regarding “gender dysphoria and its various modes of treatment.” What she’s basically saying here is, “Gosh, nobody hardly even knew transgenders existed until a few days ago so since this whole thing is so brand new no one could possibly have an appropriate way to treat it!”
What the court is ignoring, of course, is that transgender people have always existed. Gender-affirming care isn’t the Cybertruck of medicine as so many people want to believe. It isn’t new; it isn’t untested. It isn’t something that happens in a van in a Target parking lot.
Out of the nine justices, only one of them understands this. Let’s hear it for Justice Debra Lehrmann! In her dissent, she wrote, “The law is not only cruel — it is unconstitutional,” and called the law banning gender-affirming care a “hatchet, not a scalpel.”
Slay, Queen!
According to The New Civil Rights Movement, “[Lehrmann] also mocked the idea that the Court’s ruling didn’t ‘deprive children diagnosed with gender dysphoria of appropriate treatment.’ Lehrmann pointed out that by upholding the law, it ‘effectively forecloses all medical treatment options that are currently available to these children … under the guise that depriving parents of access to these treatments is no different than prohibiting parents from allowing their children to get tattoos.’”
Wait, what? Does Texas really have a law against parents letting kids get tattoos? Texas? My apologies for interrupting. Justice Lehrmann, do go on.
“Indeed, the leading medical associations in this field do not recommend surgical intervention before adulthood. Without a doubt, the removal of a young child’s genitalia is something that neither the conventional medical community nor conscientious parents would condone,” she wrote. “Moreover, medical experts do not recommend that any medical intervention … be undertaken before the onset of puberty.”
Exactly! Right-wingers are always talking about “mutilation” when arguing that transgender people should even be allowed to exist at all. First of all, the “mutilation” argument is not true, but they’re literally arguing that transgender people shouldn’t even exist because they’re perverts who are after your children. This kind of rhetoric is dangerous and leads to actual violence. Transgender people are hurt or killed every day in a society steeped in misunderstanding, mistrust and even hatred. So, yeah, excuse me if I don’t believe these folks claiming they are really worried about keeping transgender kids safe.
Obviously, there were a lot of people upset about this ruling.
“We think the Texas Supreme Court made the wrong decision, and that the result means that there’s going to be continued suffering for transgender youth and their families in Texas,” Ash Hall, a strategist on LGBTQ+ rights for the ACLU of Texas, told The Texas Tribune.
Hall is sadly correct in this assessment. These kinds of laws put targets on the backs of transgender people and the parents of transgender kids. It’s wild that Republicans are so fixated on such a small and vulnerable population. But the reason they do this is because it works. It fans the flames for their base voters who love the Republican Party for the very thing they themselves do: hatred of “the other.”
But fear not, Drag PAC is here.
That’s right, the first political action committee started by drag queens.
In a video announcing the PAC, Willam Belli says, “There is just so much anti-drag, anti-trans legislation coming from these lawmakers and these are people who know nothing about us.”
“We’re tired of being lied to,” Jinkx Monsoon says in the clip.
Aren’t we all!
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