MI: Opposition to Prop 3 Unites Anti-Abortion and Anti-Trans Propaganda
A Federalist writer seems uncertain she’ll be able to convince Michiganders to oppose a ballot initiative codifying Roe v Wade, so she’s thrown some baseless anti-trans panic in the mix, to see if that improves her chances.
by Evan Urquhart
via Margot Cleveland for the Federalist, a right wing news and opinion website
I’m not saying that Margot Cleveland of the Federalist is desperate to find something, anything, to scare Michigan voters out of codifying the rights of women to access an abortion, but I’m also not not saying that. The staunchly conservative, anti-abortion, legal correspondant for the Federalist seems to want to make Prop 3, which would protect Michigan women’s right to reproductive freedom according to ballotpedia, about trans children.
The thrust of Cleveland’s concern seems to rest on language in the question guaranteeing all people autonomy over their reproductive healthcare, which is listed as including abortion, birth control, and sterilization. However, there are exceptions in the law allowing for the state to override an individual’s judgement if doing so is deemed in their own best interests. This could mean protecting someone who lacked the ability to give informed consent due to young age, psychosis, or a severe intellectual disability, or banning harmful or ineffective quack treatments which aren’t backed by medical evidence. Cleveland, however, has hyperfocused on one word: Sterilization.
The above passage, which opens the column, contains an outright falsehood. Puberty blockers are not sterilizing drugs. They do not cause sterilization, and have no known impact on fertility, period.
Cleveland is not wrong in noting that the law doesn’t specify an age for when these reproductive rights kick in, which means a pregnant teenager might be able to acess an abortion without parental notification, if the proposed law passes. However, gender-affirming care is not usually considered part of “the right to make and carry out all decisions about pregnancy, such as prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, contraception, sterilization, abortion, miscarriage management, and infertility,” which is what this ballot measure is concerned with. That’s because “sterilization” is neither a common nor desired focus for most trans people.
Discussions of fertility in general can be something of a red-herring in the conversation about gender-affirming treatments. In addition to puberty blockers having no impact on fertility, new evidence has been presented that hormone treatments, which had once been thought to carry a significant risk to fertility, are far less likely to result in sterilization than was previously imagined. That said, it is true that there are some procedures that some trans people access which can result in losing the ability to have a child. Cleveland mentions these procedures a little lower:
So would this ballot measure allow children to access hysterectomy or vaginoplasty without the consent of their parents? That’s… almost certainly not the case. The state of Michigan would still be able to regulate these procedures, in accordance with the principles of evidence-based medicine. In practice that means they would likely rely on WPATH guidelines covering affirming care for adolescents. The WPATH guidelines take risks to fertility very seriously. They advise multiple counseling sessions specifically relating to fertility before beginning any treatment which could impact it, and recommend strongly against treating youth without parental involvement unless that involvement is “determined to be harmful to the adolescent or not feasible.”
Exactly how WPATH guidelines would interact with Michigan law is not clear, but nothing about the proposed law or the guidelines for gender-affirming treatment suggests that teenagers would ever earn the sudden right to access castration or hysterectomy on demand. To say the proposed amendement would allow that is ridiculous.
