GOP Lawmakers Reveal Their “Endgame”: Banning All Transition

A planned crackdown on trans people of all ages would solidify the GOP’s attempt to redefine medical harm as whatever they want it to mean.

Are we boiling yet? photo by Tommy Bond / Unsplash

by Evan Urquhart

The relentless propagandist and legislative attacks on gender-affirming care for youth were never intended to stop with kids, and now key legislators behind these efforts have admitted as much. As first reported by independent transgender journalist Erin Reed, GOP legislators from Ohio and Michigan revealed that the “endgame” for the ongoing legislative attacks on trans youth healthcare are to ban gender-transition for people of all ages. Representative Gary Click, the main sponsor for Ohio’s ban on gender-affirming care for youth, explained the plan to “take one bite at a time” in GOP attacks on the transgender community, undermining the claimed rationale that bans on gender-affirming care for youth are about protecting children.

In the Republican party, many subfields of science and medicine are being viewed with increasing skepticism, often verging on conspiracism, not just around gender-affirming medicine but climate science, to vaccinations and public health policy, and reproductive healthcare. That’s the best context to understand the conversation uncovered by Erin Reed in a Twitter Spaces event that was apparently intended to be private, but was released publicly due to the nature of Twitter Spaces (attendance at a Twitter Spaces event can be limited, but the audio is automatically made public by Twitter afterwards). In the conversation Michigan state Representative Josh Schriver repeatedly stated that gender-affirming care was tantamount to mutilation and should be banned for people of all ages, to the vocal agreement of anti-trans activist and detransitioner Prisha Mosely as well as Representative Click, who stressed that progress towards a total ban on gender transition must be incremental, and Michigan Representative Brad Paquette who said he agreed and suggested the group should “chat offline about all this good stuff.”

screenshot from Erin in the Morning

Using transition as the primary treatment for gender dysphoria in adults has a robust evidence base and a history going back many decades. Arguments seeking to limit treatment for younger patients tend to stress the relatively more recent history, and therefore somewhat smaller base of evidence, for this population alongside arguments that the population seeking treatment may have changed in recent years, which opponents have speculated might make the evidence in favor of their care less applicable.

Schriver’s statements that all transition is equally harmful is a departure from the usual script ideologues use to undermine support for youth transition. These arguments play up uncertainties and questions in the field of gender-affirming care for youth, and rely on the people believing it won’t hurt if young people have to wait until they turn 18 to pursue transition. Of course, youth in desperate medical need are harmed greatly by having to wait years to pursue the only evidence-backed treatment for gender dysphoria, but the idea that waiting a while can only be to their benefit is one of the ways draconian bans on needed care have been sold to an underinformed public.

In his comments to the Twitter Spaces, Schriver is being far more honest about the real beliefs opponents of gender-affirming care have about the trans community and transgender healthcare. Instead of believing youth would not be harmed by having to wait a few years, they believe, against all evidence, that being transgender is definitionally incompatible with healthy thriving. Having defined “becoming transgender” as inherently harmful, they then understand it as equally harmful for people of all ages.

It perhaps goes without saying, but Schriver and ideologues like him aren’t using a medical or scientific definition of harm. Surveys can measure the outcomes of trans people who are allowed to transition and show it leads to more life satisfaction. A person who is more satisfied with her life after transition is a person who has benefitted. There are, in fact, multiple strains of evidence, going back at least half a century, supporting transition as a necessary and beneficial treatment for people with gender dysphoria. While the evidence for treatments that begin in adolescence is more recent, it follows the common sense path of medical treatments with high success in adults eventually being offered to children. The main difference is that, due to widespread transphobia, it took much, much longer for adult treatments to begin to be offered to children with the same symptoms.

The bigger picture is that the Republican party has long been trending towards skepticism and even conspiratorial beliefs about scientific evidence that disagrees with their religious or ideological belief system. When facts contradict what they want to be true, they disregard the facts and attempt to discredit the scientific experts. Increasingly thin lines of evidence and quack scientists are held up as justification, but their ideology drives the decision of which experts they claim are trustworthy.

In most cases, the process of manufacturing evidence happens in think-tanks and advocacy groups, while the legislators themselves pretend to have been persuaded by the evidence. This Twitter Spaces conversation is damning because it unmasks the sausage-making behind the scenes, where an end goal or conclusion is decided on first by lawmakers, after which evidence is procured, however thin, to make their goals sound justifiable.