What Do Gender-Affirming Care, Sex Ed, and TikTok Have in Common?

Conservatives want to ban all of them!

by Evan Urquhart

Sometimes in right-wing media analysis you have to notice the patterns and draw out connections for the reader, and other times conservatives just do it for you. This morning the Heritage Foundation’s “news” wesite, the Daily Signal, published a round up of bills the Heritage Foundation approves of which were passed in Montana’s House of Representatives. This is the same House that recently banned Representative Zooey Zephyr from the floor for speaking up for trans rights, as the Signal positively cackles to mention. The list of Heritage-approved bills includes a gender-affirming care ban for minors, a rule to notify parents before “human sexuality instruction” in the classroom, and a ban on the TikTok video-sharing app.

The article starts out in a straightforwardly noxious manner, citing the ban on gender-affirming care for youth in an approving fashion, mentioning detransitioners as if they have any bearing on the question of whether gender-affirming care should be banned, and misgendering Rep. Zephyr. Then it kinda… zags a bit:

This author skips over the ban on instruction about human sexuality fairly quickly (the two sentences above are all there is about it), but it’s worth pausing for a minute to look closer at the wording. Is this a bill that would notify parents before sex-ed classes? Or, is it a broader ban on mentioning the existence of LGBTQ+ people outside of sex-ed classes that parents are notified about? If recent GOP “Don’t Say Gay” bills are any guide, it could well be the latter. Who knows?

While the ban on gender-affirming care and the parental-notification bill are both concerned with minors, the TikTok ban is, well, a ban on the entire video sharing app TikTok. For everybody. In the entire state. Of Montana.

The rationale for the ban on TikTok is to protect the safety of Americans’ data. But in a world ruled by anything other than successive moral panics, protecting Americans’ data would best be achieved by a federal law regulating data collection neutrally, not a ban on one particular app which is almost certain to lose in the courts because it’s completely arbitrary. Likewise, protecting young people with gender dysphoria would best be achieved by following the recommendations of major medical organizations, and only making changes to a treatment protocol gradually in a way that kept up with the evidence. And, children would learn sex-ed in a way that followed the best evidence from public health research, not in a way that catered fringe parents with an axe to grind against gay people.

It’s hard to understand what the Heritage Foundation believes is the connection between banning young people from accessing safe, effective treatments for gender dysphoria and banning grandmothers from watching silly dances, and the writer doesn’t make it clear. It’s probably not that both bills seem patently unconstitutional and unlikely to hold up in court, though that’s one obvious connection. They also both represent breathtaking assaults on the freedoms of people in Montana. And they both presage a future where the GOP controls everything we do and say and watch, informed partly by Christian nationalism, partly by the random pique of whatever racist conspiracy-mongering YouTuber is currently popular.

Increasingly, we seem to have abandoned even the dream of a world where politicians legislate based on reason, evidence, and a respect for civil liberties.