Opening up Twitter today, I was greeeted with this headline:
The headline comes from this typically sensationalist post on The Federalist by John Daniel Davidson, which argues that hospitals providing “gender affirming care” to children and adolescents are actually abusing them and forcing them into “barbaric” genital surgery.
His prime example of this alleged villainy? Doctors and staff at the Boston Children’s Hospital, whom Davidson, a senior editor at The Federalist, accuses of
touting so-called “gender-affirming care,” which includes chemical castration, mastectomies, hysterectomies, and genital mutilation performed on minors. … they are not just angling to get between parents and their children, they are angling to get healthy girls and boys onto the operating table.
In fact, the hospital doesn’t put any “girls and boys” on the operating table; surgeries are reserved for those 18 and older.
But as a result of these sorts of lies — spread on Twitter and elsewhere by the transphobic Libs of Tik Tok account and others — angry anti-trans “activists” have unleashed a wave of harassment against doctors and staff at the Boston Children’s Hospital, with some threatening to kill or otherwise harm doctors and their families.
All this for providing non-surgical medical and mental health care to young people who could really use it. In fact, one 2022 study found that providing gender affirming care
including puberty blockers and gender-affirming hormones, was associated with 60% lower odds of moderate or severe depression and 73% lower odds of suicidality over a 12-month follow-up.
In other words, “gender affirming care” literally saves lives.
Apparently, the Federalist thinks that providing necessary care to trans and nonbinary kids counts as “going after your children” and is part of what Davidson’s post calls the
larger effort on the part of the left to sever the relationship between parent and child and reshape society in a way that allows adults, especially adult men, to fulfill their every desire — often at the expense of children.
In case you missed it, he’s insinuating that trans women are pedophiles.
Meanwhile, everyone’s favorite far-right congresswoman, Marjorie Taylor Greene, wants to take a step beyond merely protesting hospitals and criminalize all kinds of “gender affirming care.” She’s introducing a bill she perversely calls “The Protect Children’s Innocence Act” that would make “pharmaceutical ‘gender affirmation’ of minors a class C felony, punishable by up to 25 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.”
Outlining her plan on Tucker Carlson’s nightly show, she declared, without any evidence, that gender affirming care “is really child abuse, this is actually an assault, and it’s child abuse.”
No, but depriving young people of lifesaving care arguably is a kind of child abuse.
The bill would also prohibit schools from ever mentioning gender affirming care. Because of course.
it’s not known how many other lifesaving medical interventions MTG would like to ban.
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I dread to think where we’ll be in two years. How soon until we have our own Kristalnacht?
She’s the living embodiment of the punchline “lacks the depth and the charm.”
MTG is coming for you and your children, probably with a gun.
Point her out to your kids with “This is why you need to finish high school.”
She’s evil, but she’ll die. I’d Lille’s be it at that, but – I refuse to kill or use violence or by my inaction assist in it – for this… what IS it? … waiting means great harm to vey many others.
She already deserves a fate out of the Twilight Zone, and a bitter twist at that.
@GSS Ex-Noob:
Marjorie Taylor Greene graduated from high school and has a business degree. It’s Lauren Boebert who is the high school dropout. Understandable mistake, since both of them act like uneducated idiots, and occasionally people mix them up. But it’s best to keep the record straight.
Well, we can start with therapeutic abortions.
This woman isn’t bright enough to understand the damage she does whenever she opens her mouth. I doubt she’s bright enough to learn anything new. She needs to sit down and shut up.
If anything ever called for a libel lawsuit …
Vaccinations?
So what effect would this have on surgery to enforce gender on intersex kids and to camouflage circumcising surgeons’ oopsies?
What bothers me even more than the extent to which far-right loons are a threat to trans people is the way in which their rhetoric even seeps into well-intentioned liberals’ heads.
My parents wouldn’t touch MTG with a ten-foot pole, but they’ve still asked me on several occasions if someone is trying to convince me to be trans.
MTG, DeSantis, etc are actually succeeding at shifting the Overton window, and that’s even worse than anything they can do by themselves, because it means potential allies will instead sit by while the anti-LGBTQ fascists do their work.
Strange.
I don’t see any reference to previous (maybe current in some places) practices of castration and similarly drastic procedures carried out on helpless infants when doctors and parents can’t see a clear set of one *acceptable* genitalia.
Or are these people so ignorant (and uncaring) that they’ve never bothered to find out what happens/ happened to newborns with complicated/ absent/strange appearing organs.
And Hooray!!!! De Santis’s don’t say gay legislation has been judged to violate 1st amendment. Not much of a hooray really. He and his scaly mates knew this would happen. But he’s got himself big buckets of cash and more supporters from pulling this stunt.
TO BE COMPLETELY FAIR, they actually will perform top surgery on trans boys who are 16… BUTTTT to get it, they have to have agreement on it from the kid’s parents, their therapist, their doctor and their surgeon. 4 adults. If one disagrees, it doesn’t happen.
But Matt Walsh failed to mention that in yet another screed calling for people to “do something” about these people cutting healthy breasts off underage “girls”.
The sad part is this has emboldened people like Matt Walsh to call for more stochastic terrorism against trans healthcare services with those disingenuous descriptions. I could make any surgery sound like a bloodbath of horror being performed on some poor deluded person too, without technically lying… such is the nature of words.
I have yet to see these people freak out about 15, 16, 17 year old cis girls getting breast implants for beauty pageants.
@Snowberry: I stand corrected. As you say, it’s easy to confuse them. They, uh (heavy irony) all look alike to me.
I guess she’s proof that education is wasted on some people. Why isn’t the RW complaining that she’s one of those “college elites”? I guess business degrees are fine, the better to make the lives of the majority suck.
@Seth S: I bet you don’t have to jump through so many hoops if you’re an overweight teenage boy with moobs.
(Hope you’re well as can be — good to see you here)
Honestly, I think the only proper and good solution is to ban MTG, and I do not speak of the collectible card game.
I hope she steps on d4s coated in cat diarrhea every time she goes to bathroom at night. Even if no one roleplays and she (hopefully) doesn’t have a cat.
@GSS ex-noob
At least one trans woman I know had that “problem” as a teenager and was forced by her parents to get them removed against her will. So yeah, definitely fewer hoops. 🙁
These sorts are just so vile. They have no empathy for anyone who doesn’t look, behave, and believe as they do and it just breaks my brain.
A small ray of hope is the son of a friend; a trans boy graduating high school next year. He is an awesome kid who wants to be an activist and knows no fear.
@Elaine
I had no idea that was a thing, and now I feel like throwing up forever.
@Cyborgette
I remember a news story about a pageant girl’s mother gave her “diet pills” to help her lose weight. She was around 16. And those pills were tape worms.
@Elaine
Patriarchy needs to burn. 🙁
@Cyborgette, @Elaine:
Snopes has never found a verified story about tapeworm diet pills.
So the girl was more likely being given good ol’ amphetamines. /s
@Nequam: Knowing the sort of people who do that to their kids, probably meth from the backwoods cousin.
For some time now I’ve had the horrible suspicion that MTG isn’t reality challenged at all. She knows perfectly well that there are no Jewish space lasers and that trans people aren’t dangerous. She’s a stone-cold psychopath who uses stochastic terrorism as a tool, the way I use a screwdriver.
If the hospital staff want to sue, then I’ll contribute to their GoFundMe. It worked for Alex Jones
-MTG, probably
These people carrying out a program of dehumanizing othering against LGBTQ people. I feel like we all know where that road leads.