Transphobes Target Trans Children from Military Families

Right wing media attack support for trans youth wherever they can. Military families are one example.

by Evan Urquhart

There are many avenues the right is using to attack transgender youth and their families. One effort that’s flown somewhat under the radar is the effort to prevent trans youth whose parents serve in the military from being supported at school or having access to affirming care. In an opinion essay for the Federalist, writer Ann Haywood bemoans the failure of an amendment that would have forced schools administrated by the Department of Defense to allow parents to review all reading material accessible to students and all teacher training materials as well.

This is similar to other parents’ rights approaches, which as we’ve written about previously are being pushed by libertarian groups which oppose public education and child welfare agencies on ideological grounds. These groups’ ultimate goal is to dismantle public education in the US, largely because they see government spending on education for poor families as wasteful and unnecessary. Parents’ rights is just the latest gambit in their opposition to public schooling, and has been added to ongoing efforts to replace public school funding with vouchers that can be used for religious instruction and other unregulated private schools.

The language of the piece is, as usual, highly inflammatory and not based in fact. For example, the writer claims that educators are practicing something called an “affirmation-only” approach. There is no such approach. The word only seems to have been tacked on by the writer to make gender affirmation sound more threatening, while in reality it’s about listening to what patients are saying and taking them seriously, as opposed to contradicting them or trying to force them to conform.

Children of military families are more vulnerable because the federal government has oversight of their education and medical care. This is unlike other American children whose education is still primarily overseen at the local level. Even so, most children in military families attend public schools near where their parents are stationed, not schools overseen directly by the Department of Defense, so laws requiring only DOD-administered schools to share training materials with parents would not have a particularly large reach. Of more concern is the obsession with trans youth on the right, which drives conservatives to attack trans youth from any angle they can find, searching for vulnerable populations in the hopes of removing healthcare and support whenever they can.