Therapies for trans children at issue

Some shameless someone — perhaps from a rightwing advocacy outfit — has divined that injecting the word “transgender” into the 2020 political narrative will rouse the MAGA-hatwearing masses into an election day frenzy.

How else to explain, other than by magic or serendipity, the sudden appearance in legislatures of certain Trumpian states, including Florida, of very similar bills designed to limit medical therapies for transgender kids.

In Tallahassee, state Sen. Dennis Baxley, better known as a champion of NRA-sanctioned gun laws and as a protector of confederate monuments, is sponsoring socalled the Vulnerable Child Protection Act. His bill would make it a felony for doctors to provide hormonal therapies, gender reassignment surgeries and other medical treatment for minors who identify as transgender. “We have a responsibility in protecting children,” Baxley told ABC News. “I’m very concerned about protecting children from medical procedures that could be damaging to them physically.”

Floridians can either accept the medical expertise of Baxley, an Ocala funeral director, in matters concerning the welfare of transgender children. Or we could go with the American Academy of Pediatrics, which recommends consigning the treatment of these kids to specialists in “comprehensive gender-affirming and developmentally appropriate health care.” Besides, genderaltering surgery is rarely performed on anyone under 18.

But best medical practices aren’t really the point of the senator’s legislation, which was filed Jan. 13, a day ahead of the deadline for the 2020 legislative session. (A companion bill was filed in the House by Rep. Anthony Sabatini, who pops up on Google among those unfortunate politicians who once expressed their schoolboy exuberance in blackface.) This stuff’s meant to provoke a visceral response among social conservatives still seething over transgender schoolchildren having the right to visit restrooms of their choice, and who suspect that transgender identity is some kind of perverse, unnatural, irreligious, liberal invention. The Washington Post reported that conservative Republican state lawmakers have introduced remarkably similar legislation in South Carolina, Colorado, Oklahoma and Missouri. Other bills limiting transgender youth medical therapies are percolating in Kentucky, Georgia and Texas. The legislative flurry seems to have been inspired by the rightwing media’s obsession with a bitter child custody case out of a Dallas suburb last fall, in which the father of a 7-year-old objected to his ex-wife, a pediatrician, allowing the male-born child to dress and socially transition as a girl.

Meanwhile, legislation that bars transgender kids from participating in school sport competitions not matching the gender designation on their birth certificates has been introduced in Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Missouri, New Hampshire, Tennessee, Idaho and Washington state.

(Which raises a certain irony, given that the athletic advantages of a transgender child designated at birth as a boy over female athletics — no one seems worried about the reverse situation — would be somewhat offset by the very hormonal regime that would be prohibited by the transgender medical legislation. Admittedly, that’s my own flimsy supposition and I possess no more expertise in these physiological complexities than Sen. Baxley or Rep. Blackface.) Rightwing websites have been fixated on both these transgender issues, particularly since the Twitter account of another well-known expert, Donald Trump Jr., characterized transgender medical therapies as “child abuse” and, earlier, called the athletic controversy “bulls—t” and “an outrage.”

Florida seems to have dodged the transgender sports controversy, at least for this session, and Baxley’s medical therapy bill seems to have generated more headlines than actual support among his fellow lawmakers. Still, you can’t underestimate the key legislator behind Florida’s infamous “Stand Your Ground” self-defense law.

Last year, Baxley pushed another controversial measure popular among social conservatives that would have banned abortions once fetal heartbeats are detected.

The bill failed but he still managed to infuriate progressives when he talked about the bill on public radio, warning that while white folks are aborting themselves out of existence, brown and black people are cranking out babies, willy-nilly. “When you get a birth rate less than 2%, that society is disappearing,” Baxley said, repeating a trope often invoked by white supremacists. “And it’s being replaced by folks that come behind them and immigrate, [who] don’t wish to assimilate into that society and they do believe in having children.”

It’s an election year and the likes of Sen. Baxley seem to have become very interested in children’s health care.